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Book 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



DO THE DEAD DEPART? 



DO THE DEAD 
DEPART? 

And Other Questions 



By 
E. KATHARINE BATES 

Author of " Seen and Unseen " 



OP 



NEW YORK 

DODGE PUBLISHING COMPANY 

220 EAST 23D STREET 






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Copyright, ipo8, by 
Dodge Publishing Company 



[do the dead depart ?] 



Dedication 

TO THE MEMORY OF 

RICHARD HODGSON, LL.D. 



PREFACE 

This book is not evidential. That is 
not its aim. There is already a flood of 
literature on these subjects, written by 
experts for experts. 

After twenty-five years of constant 
study and investigation and of meeting 
other psychic students in every quarter 
of the globe, I suppose I may consider 
myself somewhat of an expert ? 

When writing Seen and Unseen it oc- 
curred to me : Why should not some one, 
who has a little knowledge in these mat- 
ters, write a simple book for the general 
public, telling frankly and accurately a 
few simple personal experiences, without 
technical dissertations upon the theories 
connected with such experiences ? 

It is difficult for some of us to realize 
that a story may be told quite accurately, 
and yet, not from the purely evidential 
point of view. The latter, of necessity, 
involves a mass of small details, very 
7 



8 PREFACE 

wearisome for the ordinary reader, and in 
many cases of no essential importance to 
the narrative ; but not one of which can 
be omitted in an exhaustive evidential 
report. 

In spite of the very genial and kindly 
reception given to my last book, some of 
my reviewers have missed this point. 
They have lamented the absence of 
" evidence "in Seen and Unseen, not realiz- 
ing that the presence of " evidence " would 
have entailed page upon page of weari- 
some repetitions ; wearisome, I mean, of 
course, to those who have not yet begun to 
take a scientific interest in psychic matters. 

It is to these people that both my books 
are primarily addressed. 

I wanted to talk to them through my 
writing, just as I should have talked to 
them in real life, had we met, and had they 
said to me, " Now do tell me, as a sensible 
woman, what first attracted your attention 
to these questions ? Have you had any 
personal experience, apart from profes- 
sional mediums, etc., etc. ? " 

Some kind friends, on both sides of the 
Veil, have deeply regretted my writing 



■ PKEFACE 9 

in a style " so far below my capacity and 
brain power." But it seems to me that 
our only justification for writing at all in 
these overburdened days, is the fact that 
we have something to say to somebody. 
It is not a question of trying to impress 
people with the amount or quality of 
one's brain power (every one has brains 
nowadays !) but of getting them to listen 
to what one says. And in psychic matters, 
at any rate, it has been made very plain 
to me that so far as I am concerned, the 
public prefers a genial chat to a more 
elaborate presentation of my views and 
experiences. 

The late Dr. Alfred Williams Momerie 
(one of our most brilliant Cambridge 
scholars and at one time an intimate 
friend of mine) often said to me, "Always 
remember that it is extremely easy to make 
simple things complicated, and extremely 
difficult to make complicated things appear 
easy." 

All those who know his books or re- 
member his lectures, will admit that he 
gave a brilliant example of how the latter 
difficulty could be met and overcome. 



10 PREFACE) 

So I have written the present little 
book on much the same lines as the last, 
so far as that is compatible with the dif- 
ference of subject-matter. 

I shall be more than satisfied if it re- 
ceive as kind and genial a welcome as that 
which greeted my Psychic Reminiscences. 

E. Katharine Bates. 



CONTENTS 



I. 


Some Objections to 


Spirit Re 






turn . 






. 13 


n. 


Some Instances of Spirit Eeturn 28 


in. 


A Mother's Guardianship 


IN 




America . 


. 




46 


IV. 


A Curious Illustration 


r 


OI 


? 




Spirit Methods 


. 






69 


v. 


Biblical Incidents 


. 






. 93 


VI. 


Clairvoyance 


. 






. Ill 


VII. 


Clairaudience 


. 






134 


viii. 


Eeincarnation 


. , 






149 


IX. 


Automatic Writing 


. 






. 167 


X. 


Materialization . 


. 






. 189 


XI. 


How the Dead Depart 






, 218 


xn. 


Guardian Children 


• « 






. 238 



11 



Do the Dead Depart? 

CHAPTER I 

SOME OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 

A few months ago, I published with 
Messrs. Dodge Publishing Company, a 
book entitled Seen and Unseen, in which I 
related as simply as possible some of the 
events in my own life which distinctly 
suggest a supernormal cause. I say super- 
normal advisedly, for I think we have all 
learned by this time that nothing which 
happens can possibly be supernatural. 
That would be a contradiction in terms. 
Any event of which the immediate cause 
does not at present enter into the ordinary 
racial knowledge must of necessity be 
supernormal. It is equally certain that it 
cannot be supernatural. 

It has been suggested that I should 
write a second book dealing with similar 
13 



14 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

experiences but more specially touching 
upon the question, " Do the dead return?" 
Were I criticising this title instead of 
writing upon it I should be inclined to 
put the query, " Do the so-called dead 
return ? " for there is a finality about the 
word dead which at once prejudges the case. 

How can the dead return or do any- 
thing else involving movement and 
action ? 

It is the living who return. It is the 
living who depart, for that matter. How 
can a dead man depart or return ? We 
hear a great deal about the worthlessness 
of words. It often seems to me that the 
worth and the power of words are incalcu- 
lable and almost infinite. 

How many delusions have been gen- 
erated and built up and have flourished 
for centuries owing to a loose or incorrect 
use of words ? 

Both science and theology have curious 
records and strange tales to tell us on this 
subject. A whole creed may rest upon so 
frail a foundation as the omission or 
addition of a tiny word of three letters : 
such a word as " not/' for example. 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 15 

Again, the whole structure of the doctrine 
of the resurrection of our present flesh 
bodies, devoutly believed in for centuries 
and still held fervently by many good 
people, has rested upon the text, " Yet in 
my flesh shall I see God." But the 
revised version of the Bible translates this 
text, " Yet from my flesh shall I see God," 
and the marginal note to this gives " with- 
out" as an equivalent for " from," thus 
making the sense of the whole sentence 
the exact antithesis of that which we have 
been hitherto taught. "Yet in my flesh 
shall I see God " thus becomes, " Yet with- 
out my flesh shall I see God." 

Who can say that words are of little 
value when one short word can thus 
create or destroy the whole doctrine of a 
resurrection of the flesh f 

So much for the worthlessness of 
words ! Now when people talk of a dead 
man they are really using words in a 
contradictory sense, no matter how 
firmly custom and tradition have justi- 
fied them in doing so. 

A body can die but a man cannot die, 
although I suppose we all talk about 



16 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

dead men occasionally just as we all talk 
about a rising and setting sun when we 
really know that we mean the exact con- 
trary of what we say. 

An absolutely convinced and absolutely 
logical materialist — if such a being really 
exists — may say, " But I entirely deny 
your premises. I maintain that a man 
can die, because I deny the existence in 
him of anything beyond perishable ma- 
terial which dies as man and can only 
endure through transmutation into other 
forms of matter." Such a materialist has 
perfect liberty to make such an asser- 
tion ; but it is assertion pur et simple, and 
the presumption of evidence is against 
him ; enormously and increasingly 
against him as the years go on and meta- 
psychics begin to take their due place as 
a subject for scientific investigation. 

It may however be well to clear the 
ground at once by saying that this book 
is not addressed to that mythical and ex- 
piring dodo — the thorough-paced ma- 
terialist. He is quite as rare nowadays 
as the historical dead Donkey that no- 
body ever saw. 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 17 

Assuming, therefore, that no one is 
likely to read this little book who is not 
prepared to admit that man is a spirit, 
however little we may comprehend the 
exact nature of spirit, and has a body, we 
can go on to the next point. 

Speaking just now of the enormous in- 
fluence of words — rightly or wrongly 
used — reminds me of Shakspeare's dog- 
matic and most unfortunate assertion as 
regards the " bourne from which no 
traveler returns." It is unnecessary to 
point out how he contradicts his own 
words again and again in his plays by 
describing, as well as suggesting, visitors 
from that distant bourne. In spite of 
this, his words have been quoted again 
and again by all those who deprecate such 
visits and object to such visitors, and we 
are continually reminded that our greatest 
poet and philosopher demonstrated the 
impossibility of any intercourse between 
the living and the so-called dead ; whilst 
in the same breath they will point out as 
a further clinching of the argument, that 
" Holy Writ " specially deprecates the 
attempt to establish such intercourse. 



18 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

Oh, blessed inconsistency ! Why should 
the writers of the Bible forbid and de- 
nounce a practice that is impossible f 
And why again, should those who quote 
Shakspeare's well-worn words as proof of 
the impossibility of the practice quote 
Scripture at the same moment as proof of 
its wickedness f 

Why ? Simply because human nature 
is inconsistent ab initio, and never so in- 
consistent as when it is led by strong 
prejudice either to condemn or to ap- 
prove. 

I think any intelligent observer must 
be struck by the fact that taking 
humanity (as it now stands) as a whole, 
there is both undoubted indifference to, 
and most undoubted fear of, any possible 
intercourse between our present sphere 
and that which we believe will follow it. 

No doubt this is partly theological — 
especially the fear. 

To acknowledge that our departed 
friends not only can but do return to us 
— (I would rather say that they have 
never wholly left us) — here and now, is a 
complete bouleversement of Orthodox 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 19 

Theology — by which latter I mean the- 
ology, not even as it has been presented 
in the Bible, but as it has been inter- 
preted to us from the Bible, by our 
various Churches or teachers. 

I remember once in America having a 
deeply interesting talk with Dr. Phillips 
Brooks of Boston, in connection with a 
letter I had written to him. When we 
met to discuss the latter, my first words 
were, " I am afraid, Dr. Brooks, you will 
have thought my letter rather unortho- 
dox ? " I have never forgotten his look 
of genuine surprise as he answered 
quietly, " Such an idea never crossed my 
mind. I was deeply interested in your 
letter — I never thought about its being 
orthodox or unorthodox. In fact, I 
don't quite know how people define 
those words. Nor do I think I have 
much respect for orthodoxy unless it 
means the Truth." 

How characteristic these courageous 
words are, read in the light of his own 
broad grasp of truth and impatience of 
those who would place stumbling-blocks 
in the way of its attainment ! "I asked 



20 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

for bread and you gave me a stone." I 
asked for Truth and you gave me— 
Orthodoxy. How many of us can say 
this in bitterness and loneliness of heart 
and spirit ! 

It was this great preacher's passionate 
love of Christ and love of Truth and 
hatred of all that tends to diversion and 
separation that gave him his marvelous 
influence over not only his country but 
his century, in all truly religious thought. 
But for us smaller souls who have not yet 
reached these heights, the theological 
measuring tape is ever at hand and we 
are desperately afraid, some of us, of be- 
ing the eighth of an inch out in our 
theological calculations. Also I think 
we are naturally more eager to put our 
neighbors, than ourselves, through what 
may be termed the theological yard meas- 
sure. 

People have said to me again and 
again, " But how can you reconcile " (oh, 
how I hate that word " reconcile " by this 
time !) " the statements of the Bible about 
the blessed dead awaiting the last Trump 
and the final Resurrection with your idea 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 21 

that your dead friends can be with you 
and talk to you and give you messages 
and so forth ? I don't attempt to recon- 
cile anything — I can only speak of those 
things which have come to me as facts. 
There are so many apparently contradict- 
ory statements in the Bible that nobody 
can reconcile at present, if he be quite 
honest. I am willing to believe that we 
may misunderstand many of these state- 
ments owing to our own spiritual limita- 
tions. I am forced to believe that mis- 
translation may account for other dis- 
crepancies. But a long experience has con- 
vinced me personally that the Bible con- 
tains all that is necessary for our spiritual 
evolution and education, and common 
sense has convinced me that no truth on 
any plane can be in real conflict with 
Bible statements where such statements con- 
vey spiritual facts. All real facts must 
harmonize, although our present ig- 
norance may not permit us to put the 
various blocks together and make a per- 
fect map of the whole processes of the 
universe. 

Is it not unthinkable that we should be 



22 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

able to do this under the circumstances 
of our present existence ? 

To be quite honest, we must admit that 
modern theology is not nearly so comfort- 
able as were the generally-accepted re- 
ligious ideas of thirty or forty years ago, 
In those days people were divided into 
two camps as a rule, i. e., the " wholly- 
worldly," who declined to trouble them- 
selves about the future at all, boldly de- 
claring the " one world at a time " theory 
as their rule in life, and the " worldly- 
holy," by which I mean those anxious to 
make the best of both worlds and to pay 
a sort of Fire Insurance by attending to 
their religious duties for some part at 
least of one day in seven. To these latter 
it is obvious that no scheme of salvation 
could be more convenient than one which 
put belief above character, and in fact 
rather deprecated any special develop- 
ment of the latter on any other lines, 
save those of a narrow theology, as tend- 
ing to self-righteousness. To ignore the 
painful and strenuous education of life in 
building up character (a process seemingly 
as slow as that of forming corals beneath 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 23 

the sea), would naturally appeal to the 
second camp of which I speak. So also 
would the doctrine of instant salvation 
through an act of belief, and of a clean 
slate from which all the consequences of 
our errors and sins are rubbed out by that 
mysterious sponge called the Grace of 
God. 

Far be it from me to say one irreverent 
word as regards the latter, which is a 
blessed fact, known to so many of us, 
thank God ! 

The mistake has been in confusing ab- 
solution from sin with absolution from 
the consequences of sin — a totally differ- 
ent matter. The latter is a question of 
law, and so far as we have any experience, 
God never acts in contradiction to His 
laws. When such appears to be the case, 
we may be quite sure that some unknown 
factor has been left out in our calculation 
and that the apparent inconsistency lies 
in this unknown quantity, through which 
the law is acting, and not in any differ- 
ence in the working of that law. Now I 
think if there is one thing which the ex- 
perience of life teaches each one of us 



24 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

more definitely than anything else, it is 
the fact that as we sow so we must reap, 
and that for every action of our lives, 
good or bad, we shall receive payment or 
some day be called upon to make it. 
There can be no doubt that the sowing 
may have been done for us to some ex- 
tent, greater or less, as the case may be. 
In old days this seemed a terrible " injus- 
tice/' but now that science, as well as 
progressive theology are teaching us 
something of the cosmic consciousness 
and the solidarity and unity of life, a 
gleam of light has come to us. 

This is an illustration of what I said 
before. Injustice and inconsistency are 
not inherent in any law of God. Where 
they appear so, be very sure there is an 
unknown factor — an X which must be 
added to all our calculations and which 
one day will have the Divine sign = 
added to it. Still the old ideas die slowly 
and die hard. People are wary enough 
to see that if they accept the pleasant 
trend of the new ideas they will be bound 
to accept the unpleasant trend also, and 
most of them (I am speaking now of the 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 25 

" religious world," as it is called) prefer 
to leave well alone, to go on in the beaten 
tracks and to refuse the satisfaction of in- 
tercourse with their departed friends and 
relations, rather than open the door to 
some very inconvenient facts, which are 
bound to follow. 

Some years ago, when staying at Cairo, 
Lady Dunmore and I paid a visit to a 
very old friend of mine, who had lived 
there for many years and held a high 
official position in the Government 
Finance Department. His wife was dead 
and his only daughter married, and I 
think Lady Dunmore's kindly idea was 
that we might together, persuade him to 
look into psychic matters and thus bring 
some consolation into a lonely life by get- 
ting into touch perhaps with those who 
had gone on. But this was not his view 
of consolation at all. He hastened to as- 
sure us that there was nothing he should 
dislike more ! " It seems to me a hor- 
rible idea," he said quite frankly, " that 
those we loved here should know w 7 hat 
we are doing and thinking about, now 
that they have left us ! I am sure it 



26 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

would make them most unhappy," he 
continued. " And you rather uncom- 
fortable" was my mental note at the 
time. 

There was something almost pathetic 
in his eager disclaimer to any such hope 
or wish. I am sure there are many hun- 
dreds, nay, thousands, who feel just the 
same, although they might not put it so 
frankly. 

When I first realized the constant 
presence of friends in the Unseen as a 
matter of absolute conviction, I can re- 
member feeling distinctly uncomfortable. 
It gave me at first a feeling of being over- 
looked, of never being alone and so forth. 
But as the months and years passed and 
some feeble idea of the cosmic conscious- 
ness awoke, this trivial ^(/"-consciousness 
as regards that special question passed 
away forever. In the larger conscious- 
ness, believe me, there is no room for 
small, self-conscious doubts and fears of 
this kind. And as regards the more 
serious questions of our sins and short- 
comings, surely Tennyson has once for all 
answered these, in his exquisite verses. 



OBJECTIONS TO SPIRIT RETURN 27 

" Shall he for whose applause I strove, 
I had such reverence for his blame, 
See with clear eye some hidden shame, 
And I be lessened in his love 1 

" I wrong the grave with fears untrue ; 
Shall Love be blamed for want of faith? 
There must be wisdom with great death ; 
The dead shall look me through and through. 

u Be near us when we climb or fall ; 
Ye watch, like God, the rolling hours, 
With larger, other eyes than ours, 
To make allowance for us all." 



CHAPTER II 

SOME INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 

I have always felt very strongly that 
nothing but personal experience can 
really help us in deciding the momentous 
question, " Do our dead return ? " Our 
friends may tell us of their experiences 
and still more frequently of the experi- 
ences of their friends ; we may read 
dozens of books full of the most circum- 
stantial and well-attested evidence ; we 
may hear the most convincing testimony 
to an affirmative answer to our question ; 
and yet in the end to what does it all 
amount ? Absolute conviction overnight 
has become absolute incredulity by the 
morning. 

I have seen this again and again and 
must even confess to personal experience 
of this undeniable fact. Something hap- 
pens, so abnormal and yet so absolutely 
convincing to our bodily senses of sight 
and hearing, that we feel at the moment, 
28 



INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 29 

" Well, this settles matters once for all. 
There is no question of professional 
mediumship here. That which has hap- 
pened has come about quite spontaneously. 
I am in full possession of my faculties and 
am neither dreaming nor romancing. So 
far as this fact is concerned I can never 
again entertain a doubt." 

My dear friend ! probably by next 
morning — certainly by next week or next 
month or at latest next year — you will be 
full of doubts not only as to what really 
happened but even more as to your own 
powers of critical judgment. This is true 
even where purely physical phenomena 
are in question. 

Some years ago, when staying on a 
large sheep station in Queensland, Aus- 
tralia, with a son of the late Sir Arthur 
Hodgson, who had married an old ac- 
quaintance of mine, I witnessed a curious 
illustration of this point. 

Two Englishmen, friends of my hosts, 
from distant stations, had arrived one 
evening unexpectedly, in the charming 
Colonial fashion, and were to be hospi- 
tably entertained for a day or two. 



30 DO THE DEAD DEPAKT? 

My host and hostess were extremely 
anxious that I should consent to a little 
" sitting " on the evening of their guests' 
arrival and very unwillingly I felt obliged 
to fall in with this suggestion. To begin 
with, however, I made all four solemnly 
give me their word of honor that no 
trickery should take place and that if 
nothing happened I should not be re- 
proached ; whereas, if anything not to be 
explained except by trickery, should oc- 
cur, they would at least be willing to bear 
testimony to the facts. Under these con- 
ditions only, I consented to sit at the 
table with them, it being distinctly under- 
stood that each one separately had given 
me his or her word of honor that he or 
she would be entirely passive and will- 
ing to receive what came. Some ex- 
tremely unpleasant things came, as a 
matter of fact. 

The conditions were far from ideal. 
The two visitors were perfect strangers to 
me and knew nothing of psychic matters ; 
my host and hostess were in an equally 
elementary stage, and therefore mentally 
there was no sort of harmony. Physic- 



INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 31 

ally, however, there must have been a 
great deal of latent energy. There was 
full light upon the proceedings all the 
time and, apart from the solemn promise 
given, I could see that no normal force 
was being used. Yet the table rose 
several inches from the ground, whilst 
the three men and we two women had 
our hands upon it in full view and in a 
way which would naturally have pre- 
vented its rising, had not a stronger force 
been acting in the contrary direction. 
Later, this power, whether intelligent or 
unintelligent, was at least extremely de- 
structive. 

This special " station " was very charm- 
ingly furnished, more like a London 
drawing-room than an Australian sheep 
farm ; the table was beautifully inlaid 
with woods and several of the chairs used 
were also inlaid, with porcelain designs. 
When the sitting was over, the table was 
broken and two at least of the chairs 
were smashed and the pretty porcelain 
designs hopelessly wrecked. 

Our visitors were well-born and well- 
bred Englishmen and would scarcely have 



32 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

wished to ruin the property of their host 
and hostess. Certainly the latter would 
not have yearned to break up their own 
furniture, in a part of the world where 
such things are not easily replaced ! 

That night at least, there was no ques- 
tion of some extraneous force being present 
and all the men agreed that they could not 
suggest any reasonable explanation. 

At the breakfast-table next morning 
every one of them had practically re- 
tracted his confession of faith ! Night 
had brought, not counsel, but false shame. 
The old tradition of the normal, in which 
they had lived for years, proved too strong 
for their judgment upon this abnormal ex- 
perience. When taxed with the facts of 
the broken chairs and table they in- 
dignantly refuted my satirical suggestion 
that they must have broken them in some 
occult manner, under our very eyes, in 
full "ight, without detection ! 

But they appeared to have forgotten all 
their remarks of the previous evening. 
They hau slept over it, the pendulum of 
" the familiar " had swung back into 
place, dislodging the consciousness of 



INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 33 

something abnormal and inexplicable, 
and it was useless to remind them of 
their solemn vow that if anything hap- 
pened to baffle ordinary explanations 
they should admit the fact. They had 
admitted it overnight but recanted their 
confession within twelve hours, although 
absolutely incapable of suggesting any 
normal explanation. 

This is only a specimen of what is con- 
tinually occurring. It is quite natural 
that it should do so, but it shows the use- 
lessness of any phenomenal marvels with 
a view to shaking materialistic convic- 
tions in the ordinary observer and the or- 
dinary sceptic. 

This is why I do not propose to add to 
the innumerable cases which are at hand 
on every side, testifying to the continued 
existence of our so-called dead. 

The most telling " case " of another 
person's experience does not " beg' .1 to 
compare " with the smallest experience 
of your own. An ounce of pergonal ex- 
perience is worth pounds of other people's 
evidence when related by them and tons 
of other people's evidence when printed 



34 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

and not spoken. It is not by breaking 
an extra chair or table, nor by the ex- 
ceptional and very occasional experience 
of a vision or a dream that we shall gain 
conviction. It is by the daily and hourly 
consciousness of the presence of our unseen 
friends — by their kindly help and loving 
warnings and by the constant proofs they 
/ give us of a watchful companionship and 
an untiring love. 

And this must come to each one of us 
individually. We cannot hand over our 
own experience to another. We can only 
tell him what has happened to us and 
suggest that there is no reason in the 
world, except his own attitude of mind, 
to prevent his having a similar experi- 
ence. 

Developed clairaudience and developed 
clairvoyance may be indeed, and probably 
are, to a great extent the result of hered- 
ity, the inheritance left us perchance by 
previous experiences. But I believe that 
in every human being lies the germ of 
these higher senses and that if we would 
only take some simple measures to de- 
velop these germs under favorable con- 



INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 35 

ditions, we should be astounded by the 
results obtained. 

Professor Pritchard (Savilian Professor 
of Astronomy in Oxford, and one of the 
most successful and celebrated education- 
alists of the last century) said to me once, 
" No human being of common intelligence 
comes into this world, who is incapable 
of drawing to some extent — of reproduc- 
ing what he sees. I am convinced of this 
through experience and have never known 
it fail." Yet the professor would have 
been the first to admit that every boy is 
not a budding Turner nor an undeveloped 
Raphael. 

I am equally sure that the same truth 
holds good as regards psychic matters. 

Love is the great developer here as else- 
where, and if we don't succeed in getting 
into touch with our " lost " friends and 
relations, I do not for one moment believe 
it is from lack of capacity ; but either 
from lack of true purpose and incentive 
or from the presence (even unconsciously 
to ourselves) of some deterring influence, 
due to prejudice or tradition. 

Again, we are apt not to be sufficiently 



36 DO THE DEAD DEPAET? 

simple in our methods — we think some 
great step is necessary, some washing in 
Abana or Pharphar. We must go to this 
or that medium, " having no power our- 
selves." And we go, not feeling quite 
sure that it is right to do so. Perhaps we 
are met by incompetence or by that which 
appears to us an attempt at " fishing," or 
even fraud. Old investigators know well 
that the same medium who succeeds in 
one case will make an abject failure in 
the next. Why ? simply because there 
are mental laws as well as physical ones 
and some mental affinity must be estab- 
lished between sitter and medium, just 
as there must be sending and receiving 
stations established for wireless teleg- 
raphy. When one says this, people are 
apt to answer, " Ah, yes ! that proves that 
it is merely a question of telepathic trans- 
ference from the mind of the sitter to the 
mind of the medium," and they look 
greatly pleased by their own intelli- 
gent and final, if somewhat vague, as- 
sertion. 

You might just as well say that the 
necessity for receiving and despatching 



INSTANCES OF SPIEIT RETURN 37 

" stations " in wireless telegraphy and for 
the vibrations being tuned to the same 
pitch, proves that there is no sender of 
the message. It is doubtless true that 
the difficulties of discrimination and 
transmission are greater, where the tele- 
graphic lines to be used are human and 
not material and vibratory. But these 
difficulties exist to be overcome, not to be 
shunted by a slipshod and unscientific 
dictum that it is " mere telepathy be- 
tween sitter and medium, " and therefore 
not worthy of investigation. This lazy 
assertion is at once challenged and denied 
in the fairly numerous cases, where facts, 
neither in the conscious nor unconscious 
mind of the sitter (unless he be omnis- 
cient !) have been truthfully conveyed 
to the inquirer. 

But why not be independent of all 
such assistance? It may be a longer 
road but it will be more satisfactory in 
the end. The river Jordan is always at 
our doors. Why not learn to be our own 
mediums ? 

It is not impossible but it does call for 
more perseverance and concentration of 



38 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

purpose than most of us are willing to 
give or perhaps think ourselves capable 
of giving. Love is the great developer 
and Love is the great teacher. We are 
capable, if we are willing to submit to 
that teaching, and to be simple and 
persevering and receptive. 

When people come to me sometimes in 
deep distress and loneliness of heart and 
say, " Do help me ; won't you get a mes- 
sage for me from my husband or child or 
mother ? " my answer is always the same 
and much on these lines — 

" I am so sorry I cannot help you in 
the way you wish. I am not a test 
medium." (Here I explain why it is 
not well to force this type of medium- 
ship.) " I only take what comes to me 
spontaneously. You are a stranger to 
me yourself and if I attempted to get in 
touch with another perfect stranger, your 
husband or child, I should probably re- 
ceive something untrue and possibly the 
result of my own mental activity. Far 
better try for yourself and infinitely 
more satisfactory to you. Give up a few 
minutes every day when you are quite 



INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 39 

peaceful and quite alone, to concentrate 
your mind on the one you wish to speak 
to. Think of him or her as simply as pos- 
sible ; not as a far-away, mysterious spirit, 
divided from you by illimitable space, 
but as your very own child or mother or 
wife or husband as the case may be. 

Call them by name, by any pet name 
you used to use. Speak to them as if 
they were close to you, as I fully believe 
they are. If this concentration of 
thought is earnest and real you had bet- 
ter not try it for more than ten minutes 
at first. We are not accustomed to abso- 
lute concentration where every extra- 
neous thought is banished and at first we 
shall feel tired by the effort to keep the 
channel absolutely clear. But in time I 
feel quite sure, if you persevere and do not 
lose heart, some realization of the pres- 
ence of the beloved one will come to you, 
so undeniable and so convincing to your 
own consciousness that a whole college of 
philosophers or scientists will not be able 
to persuade you that the one you loved 
and lost was not in close touch with you. 
There will be a feeling of personal 



40 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

identity in time, impossible to describe 
still more impossible to deny. For Love 
is the great Revealer and you will know 
that His testimony is true." 

In some such words I have again and 
again answered some such inquiry. Per- 
sonally I have never found the advice to 
fail. In one case (already published 
under the pseudonym of Mrs. Forbes) 
the mother of a dearly-loved and only 
son took my suggestion literally and 
acted upon it and within ten days wrote to 
tell me of her great surprise and great joy 
to find that after some days of apparent 
uselessness, the daily sitting had been 
crowned with success. 

11 It is almost too wonderful to believe and 
yet I know that it is true. My boy is with 
me every day now and I can talk to him 
quite easily." This was the testimony of 
a woman of certainly marked intelli- 
gence, who had spent her whole married 
life in legal circles and was not likely to 
be ignorant of the rules of evidence nor 
to be overcredulous. 

Similar statements have come to me 
from other quarters, where I have recom- 



INSTANCES OP SPIRIT RETURN 41 

mended this very simple and certainly 
perfectly harmless step. 

There are cases of course where, after a 
long period of suffering or a busy and 
strenuous life, it is necessary that the 
spirit freed from earth conditions should 
have absolute rest. In these cases we 
must not be disappointed or doubting, if 
our communion is delayed. Should such 
be the case, we can still set that short 
time sacredly apart, to be spent in loving 
sympathy with them, rejoicing in their 
freedom from care and pain and in their 
well-earned and much-needed rest. 

It is impossible for us to know before- 
hand which spirits will be active and 
anxious to make themselves recognized 
by us and which ones will be appointed 
to rest for longer or shorter periods. The 
facts do not always tally with our own 
notions of probability and expediency. 

A marked instance of this came lately 
within my personal experience. 

In September, 1906, a dearly-loved 
brother was taken from my physical con- 
sciousness. He had had a brilliant and 
strenuous military career for over twenty 



42 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

years, and for nearly thirty years later had 
been completely paralyzed and confined 
to his armchair. 

It is almost impossible for any outsider 
to conceive the tragedy and the weariness 
of such a life, coming to such an active 
man in the very prime of his years. 

When he was taken from me and my 
whole life was overshadowed by his loss, 
there was at least the great consolation of 
knowing that for him the change was 
comparable to that of a lifelong prisoner 
emerging from a dreary prison-cell. And 
the weariness of constant weakness had 
been such that one never doubted for a 
moment but that a long resting time would 
be necessary before one could hope or even 
wish to hear of him. I was in the house 
with a friend (the Mrs. Finch of Seen and 
Unseen) at the time, and as she has de- 
cided psychic gifts we had discussed the 
matter together and entirely agreed upon 
it; although Mrs. Finch is a staunch 
Theosophist and I am no sort of " ist " at 
all ! 

Within a fortnight of my brother's 
death, I had left her at the seaside and 



INSTANCES OF SPIRIT RETURN 43 

had returned to London where some 
rather trying and tiresome business mat- 
ters required my presence. I was looking 
forward with some anxiety and discomfort 
to a business interview impossible to post- 
pone, but which might have led to a 
lengthy and unpleasant discussion under 
the special circumstances of the case, 
when to my profound astonishment and 
rather to my dismay, a message came to 
me from my brother. 

He said, " Do not trouble about to- 
morrow. It will be all right. I am so 
sorry you have had all this worry. I 
thought I had arranged everything for the 
best, but fear it has not been so after 
all." 

I was so grieved and so astonished by 
the communication that I answered in 
hot haste, " Please don't worry yourself, 
dear, about anything of this kind. I 
hoped you were resting and sleeping after 
all your sad life. For goodness' sake, 
don't trouble about me or any of these 
earthly matters ! " 

" But it is my duty and it is also my 
wish to do so," he answered at once. 



44 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

" But I thought you were unconscious 
still," was my reply. 

" No. I am awake now. I have been 
resting and unconscious for a time ; but I 
am here now to help you." 

Next morning the interview took place 
and proved to be a brilliant success. In- 
stead of the disagreeable episodes which 
had seemed inevitable, I was completely 
reassured within the first quarter of an 
hour ; after a most satisfactory visit which 
lasted two hours, my fears, which had 
been amply justified by previous events, 
were finally dispersed and I have had no 
further ground for entertaining them. I 
do not claim that this was due to my 
brother's influence ; because I should not 
be justified in doing so in a case where ab- 
solute evidence upon such a point is 
obviously absent. I may close the story 
however by mentioning a very curious 
coincidence. 

I have already said that Mrs. Finch 
and I had both agreed as to the necessity 
of a long rest for m} 7 brother, probably 
lasting several months. 

After the interview mentioned I wrote 



INSTANCES OP SPIRIT RETURN 45 

to Mrs. Finch telling her of my great sur- 
prise at receiving so early an intimation 
of my brother's presence with me. She 
was still at Eastbourne, a single post from 
London. 

The morning upon which she received 
my letter there, I received a letter from her, 
saying how greatly she had been sur- 
prised by a message from her special 
guide, " Who told me that your brother 
had already come to consciousness in his 
new surroundings. Are you not sur- 
prised to hear this ? We both felt so sure 
that it could not be so in his case." I 
need scarcely say that Mrs. Finch was 
greatly delighted to receive my independ- 
ent testimony to the same effect, crossing 
her letter. As she said at the time, " It 
was very satisfactory for both of us." 



CHAPTER III 

A MOTHER'S GUARDIANSHIP IN AMERICA 

I have said already that personal ex- 
perience is the only argument that can 
really appeal to us. I believe most firmly 
that this is the case and that the piling 
up of extraneous stories and statements 
can have little value except for the expert, 
who is, as the naturalist, collecting speci- 
mens on all sides which he may sort out 
at leisure and from which he may finally 
extract some valuable tentative general- 
ization. 

Such a course, as I have stated in my 
Preface, is in no way the aim and scope of 
this little book. The opening sentence of 
this chapter admits, however, of slight 
modification. Although an individual 
personal experience can alone convince, 
the individual personal experience of a 
reliable witness may at least suggest to us 
that what is taking place consciously in 
the experience of a sensitive, may be tak- 
46 



a mother's guardianship 47 

ing place unconsciously in the experience 
of the world at large. 

Physical phenomena exist and go on 
all round us, whether we be normal men 
and women or blind and deaf men and 
women. Is.it not reasonable to conclude 
that the same law holds good on the 
psychic plane which impinges upon and 
interpenetrates our own material exist- 
ence ? This, by the bye, suggests a com- 
mon-sense answer to the question so often 
asked, " If the departed really do appear, 
why do they so often appear to the wrong 
people ? " " Why don't I see my father 
or mother instead of hearing that some- 
body else has seen them ? " 

The only reasonable answer is that the 
" wrong people " happen to have the 
power of seeing and you don't happen to 
have it. A blind woman might just as 
well ask why she cannot see her husband, 
whilst others are able to do so, although 
obviously she must be more interested in 
him than they can possibly be ? Even 
were she deaf as well as blind it would 
not occur to her to use these facts as ar- 
guments for his non-existence I It is the 



48 DO THE DEAD DEPAET? 

sense of personality and identity, so diffi- 
cult to put into words, so undeniable in 
effect, which makes our experiences, 
whether psychic or spiritual, actual to us 
and distinct from the numerous impres- 
sions which pass away like the morning 
mists. 

Marvelous as were my experiences of 
materialization in America, it is not to 
them that I owe my conviction of the 
presence of my unseen friends. 

The most sensational experiences on the 
objective plane, no matter how keenly en- 
graved upon the memory, are bound to 
lose their weight of impression on the in- 
tellectual and spiritual faculties, as time 
passes. It is not that which has struck 
your eyes and ears and affected your 
physical senses which remains with you 
as a permanent conviction. It is the sub- 
jective knowledge of truth and identity 
which makes an experience your own. 
Nothing less than this will bear the test 
of time and change, and all the critics 
and philosophers in the world cannot 
take this from you, any more than they 
could give it to you. Not the blaring 



A mother's guardianship 49 

trumpets of " miracles " and " phenom- 
ena/' but the " still, small voice " is 
that which remains with you in the long 
run. 

It is the constant loving care and com- 
panionship of my friends in the Unseen 
—-not their occasional recognition through 
some medium — that enables me to assert 
without one moment's doubt, and with 
the authority of one who knows, that the 
dead do return, or rather that they never 
really depart. 

Richard Jefferies, in one of his ex- 
quisite bits of writing, tells us how the 
unity of life was revealed to him when he 
stood by the grave of one he loved, and 
knew that " Love could kiss the lips of 
Death." But I think we must stand as 
he did before that absolute conviction can 
come to us. To some poor souls it seems 
never to come at all. In any case it ap- 
pears to me a hopeless task to attempt to 
prove to the intellect that which tran- 
scends without contradicting the intellec- 
tual and which appeals to the spirit of 
man. So long as the spirit sleeps, we may 
knock in vain at the door of the intellect. 



1/ 



50 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

We shall have sore knuckles for our pains 
but nothing more, and the sooner we 
realize this the better. It will save us all 
annoyance and spare some of us much 
misdirected energy. 

Amongst the apparently trivial and yet 
most satisfying evidences of my mother's 
presence with me during my first Ameri- 
can journey I have noted two instances. 

My companion, Miss Greenlow, and I 
were traveling west after spending the 
winter of 1885-1886 in the Eastern 
States. 

Not knowing the conditions of climate, 
we had arranged to leave Washington 
very early in April, whilst the weather 
was still unsettled and almost wintry ; so 
soon as we had said good-bye to Wash- 
ington. The consequence was that our 
first experience of extensive American 
travel was a pretty bad " Washout." The 
water was over the wheels of the cars in 
many places and the delays were numer- 
ous and most aggravating. All the ar- 
rangements of the railway companies 
were dislocated ; we were hours behind 
our time and literally there was no means 



a mothek's guardianship 51 

of knowing, within a day or two, when 
we should arrive at Cincinnati. Naturally 
everything depended upon the state in 
which we found conditions farther on, and 
no one attempted to make any calcula- 
tions where the necessary factors were 
non-existent. 

Being already twenty-four hours behind 
our advertised time, I asked an official 
how long he thought it would be before 
we reached Cincinnati. 

" Two or three days, I guess/' was his 
grim and uncompromising answer, so I 
took the hint and did not trouble him 
again. It was a dreary start for our jour- 
ney west, to be hung up at some wayside 
station hour after hour, waiting for the 
waters to subside, then to go on for a bit 
and have a similar experience a little 
later. 

Several clairvoyants in Boston, Phila- 
delphia and Washington had independ- 
ently told me of my mother's constant 
guardianship and had given me her two 
names after very little hesitation ; so one 
evening when I was feeling very hopeless 
over our innumerable halts and waits, it 



52 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

suddenly struck me that I would consult 
her in the matter. I think at that time 
I used my watch as a means of communi- 
cation, holding a hairpin or anything of 
the kind, loosely over it in the right hand 
and repeating the alphabet until my hand 
was pushed downward to the back of the 
watch, at a special letter. 

First I asked whether we should really 
reach Cincinnati next day at all, as it 
seemed doubtful — a most reassuring 
" Yes " was tapped out. Next I asked at 
what time, and "four o'clock in the morn- 
ing " was given. Now this appeared ab- 
solutely improbable, for we were still 
many miles distant and the state of the 
road-bed gave no reasonable hope of such 
a possibility. If the answer had been 
"four p. m." I should have felt more 
confidence in it. As it was, I supposed 
that my own mentality had become 
mixed up with the message and that the 
wish as usual had been father to the 
thought. We went to bed early, after I 
had told my companion of my experience 
and we had both agreed not to believe in 
any such impossibly good news. 



a mother's guardianship 53 

We were traveling, although very 
slowly, at the time I turned in. I must 
have slept for some hours, when I was 
awakened by a sudden jolt and found 
that we were once more stationary. 
" Another stoppage as usual," I thought. 
There was absolute darkness and absolute 
silence as I lay awake musing. Then 
from the farther end of the sleeping-car I 
recognized soft, stealthy steps creeping 
past the thick curtains of my lower berth. 
I drew these cautiously aside and con- 
fronted the conductor, who instantly put 
his finger to his lips to enjoin silence for 
the sleeping-car. "Where are we?" I 
whispered cautiously. " Cincinnati," was 
his equally cautious reply. " What 
o'clock is it?" I asked with some excite- 
ment, as the remembrance of the previous 
evening came back to me. 

Even now I can recall the eerie feeling 
with which I listened for his answer. 

" Four o'clock" he answered rather im- 
patiently and turned away, to prevent the 
possibility of any further questions. 

It turned out that we had arrived con- 
siderably ahead of the most sanguine ex- 



54 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

pectations, and when daylight came and 
we were able to gain the shelter and com- 
parative comfort of the hotel, my thank- 
fulness for a safe journey after much diffi- 
culty and discomfort, was much enhanced 
by the proof of my mother's power as 
well as wish to help and cheer me. 

Some months later, a similar experience 
came to me, also at a time of considerable 
suspense. Very much against the advice 
of our American friends, Miss Greenlow 
and I had arranged to visit the Grand 
Canon of the Colorado — in Arizona, and 
not in the Rocky Mountains, as some 
people suppose. 

In those days it was a much more diffi- 
cult expedition than, I am told, it is at 
present. There was absolutely no ac- 
commodation up there except a small 
wooden shanty only used when some 
stray photographer or naturalist found 
his way to this then remote district and 
was driven up to it for a night's lodging, 
taking his provisions with him. We 
turned a deaf ear to our prudent coun- 
selors, telling them that we should never 
have seen anything in America had we 



a mother's guardianship 55 

listened to every one's advice in our 
travels ! In this special case the advice 
was more than justified, but we could not 
know this beforehand, and we were ex- 
tremely anxious to see the beauties of 
which we had heard such extravagant 
(but not really exaggerated) accounts. 

We reached Peach Springs (where the 
railway was to be left) safely, and after a 
few hours' rest in a miserable wayside inn, 
our host told us that all arrangements 
had been made for our comfort and con- 
venience and that at eleven o'clock a 
buckboard (a very primitive vehicle 
without springs) would be ready to carry 
us and the provisions ordered for us, 
some thirty-five miles up the canon to 
the wooden shanty aforesaid. We found 
that we were to be consigned to the care 
of a good-looking but rather taciturn 
young man of twenty-six or twenty-seven, 
who was later on to combine the offices of 
cook, housemaid and guide, companion 
and friend in one. For our host after 
driving us up to the shanty and giving 
us in charge to " Billy," calmly an- 
nounced that he proposed to take the 



56 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

blackboard back again, leaving us en- 
tirely dependent upon our feet for loco- 
motion. 

This was rather a shock as we had 
been led to suppose that he would " boss 
the expedition " himself and that Billy 
was only taken up as his lieutenant. 
However we had already committed our- 
selves to a three days' stay, Friday being 
the day of our arrival, and the man as- 
sured us that he had arranged the pro- 
visions accordingly and that Bilty was an 
absolutely dependable and estimable per- 
son. 

Poor Billy ! He certainly did well by 
us, but it was a little discouraging to hear 
from himself (as soon as the Peach Spring 
impostor had disappeared) that he had 
been picked up from a gambling saloon 
two or three weeks previously and that 
this was his only claim to respectability ! 

Moreover he was quite frank in telling 
us that his dearest friend had been Billy 
the Kid, a notorious character who had 
been hanged in 'Frisco five years pre- 
viously, having no less than nineteen 
murders to his account, although barely 



A MOTHER S GUARDIANSHIP 57 

twenty years old at the time of his death 
— hence I suppose his soubriquet of the 
Kid. Unfortunately for my peace of 
mind I had come upon a small life of 
Billy the Kid in San Francisco and had 
read it with some interest as indicating 
the lawless state of California, even so 
short a time as five years before our 
visit. 

Our Billy regaled us every evening 
with the other Billy's adventures which 
sounded far more lifelike from the lips of 
his bosom friend but followed very much 
the lines of the biography. We ended by 
thinking Billy the Kid rather a hero in 
spite of his crimes, and almost regretting 
the treachery of a woman which gave jus- 
tice the " drop on him/' for the first time 
in all his wild career. Still we would 
not have exchanged him for our own 
Billy, who never but once gave me a 
moment's anxiety, during our visit to 
the canon. 

This was on the Sunday morning when 
he and I started at 6 A. m. to climb a 
mountain in front of the shanty, which 
had been tempting me since my arrival. 



58 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

It was only some 3,000 feet above us, but 
the view was said to be most extensive 
and magnificent, which proved to be 
quite true. We had spent the intermediate 
day strolling up and down the canon and 
gathering exquisite flowers from the sides 
of the narrow creek or brook which ran 
through it. We had to climb a good 
many rocks during our investigations, 
and Miss Greenlow had unfortunately 
sprained her ankle over one of these and 
was quite unequal to the Sunday expedi- 
tion which we had planned, but said she 
should really enjoy a few hours alone. 
So I had no scruples in taking her at her 
word. 

After a hasty cup of tea, Billy and I set 
out together and a pretty stiff climb 
brought us at length to the plateau of the 
mountain just below the real top. 

"Got a light about you?" said Billy, 
rather gruffly, as we negotiated the last 
bit of climbing before reaching this 
plateau. Englishwomen did not smoke 
much in those days and the question 
seemed a little curious. I could only ex- 
press my sorrow that I could not accom- 



A mother's guardianship 59 

modate him, when he suddenly exclaimed, 
" Never mind — more ways than one of 
getting a light," and with that he pulled 
out his revolver rather suddenly and be- 
gan some mysterious operations with a 
cartridge from which he extracted the 
shot and with a bit of rag. 

Perhaps being tired and hungry I was 
rather fanciful, but his manner seemed a 
little queer and suddenly my absolute help- 
lessness, miles away from any habitation, 
or human being (except poor Miss Green- 
low, equally helpless and with a sprained 
ankle) broke upon me with overwhelming 
strength. How devoutly I wished Billy 
would put that revolver away ! What in 
the world was there to prevent his giving 
me a little push over the edge of the nar- 
row plateau and returning to Miss Green- 
low with the story of my fall? She 
could not start off to look for me in any 
case and without more words, nothing 
could be easier than for Billy to give her 
a blow on the head, sufficient to stun her 
for some little time at least. 

She had a very valuable gold watch 
and of course we both had a certain 



60 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

amount of money with us. After secur- 
ing this, Billy had only to make tracks 
over the mountains by another route, 
drop down on the railroad at the first 
convenient spot and soon be lost once 
more in some gambling den in 'Frisco. 

These thoughts passed through my 
mind in a flash. Billy meanwhile had 
lost his glum look and was getting more 
and more excited as he worked away at 
his cartridge. In my blank terror, I 
thought, " He is trying to work himself 
up to the point. He can't do it in cold 
blood." Just then he jumped up sud- 
denly with a wild, ear-piercing shriek, a 
sort of Red Indian war-cry, and cried 
out, " Vve done it ! " 

I really did think my last hour had 
come then ! I am still thankful to re- 
member that I gave a moment's thought 
to poor Miss Greenlow's helpless condi- 
tion even at that horrible crisis. 

When I found that Billy's terrifying 
war-cry meant nothing more murderous 
than that he had blown out the rag from 
the blank cartridge an 3 ignited it, I was 
still intensely anxious for my friend. 



A mother's GUARDIANSHIP 61 

She could not have failed to hear the cry 
in that clear air, even at such a consider- 
able distance, and I feared she might be 
entertaining the very ideas which had so 
recently filled me with terror. As a 
matter of fact, I found later that this had 
literally been the case, but felt that I 
might have saved myself much anxiety 
when she said quite placidly on my 
return, " Yes, I thought very likely you 
had fallen or that Billy had thrown you 
over ! If you had fallen I knew he 
would come and tell me, and if he had 
thrown you over, he would have come to 
take what he could find, before going 
over the mountains. I should have 
given him the watch and the money and 
then waited till the man from Peach 
Springs came back. You see, with my 
foot bad, I could not have gone to look 
after you anyway." 

How bitterly I repented my hurrying 
haste in getting home to relieve her fears, 
when this cheerfully calm and masterly 
summing up of the matter was unfolded 
to me ! 

However even Miss Greenlow's philoso- 



62 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

phy became dimmed for a moment when 
we found on that very Sunday morning 
that our Sunday dinner must consist of 
beans, as there was no meat left ! It 
then turned out that our host had only 
brought up enough meat for one whole 
day, although we had told him we 
wished to stay until Monday ! 

Billy was a real gentleman at heart 
and suffered vicariously for the sins of 
his employer, although it was obviously 
not his fault. He had known nothing 
about the commissariat's deficiencies, it 
appeared, until after the man drove away. 
Moreover, Billy also was put upon short 
commons. We had a little tea left for 
the afternoon and our supper again con- 
sisted of a handful of beans and some dry 
bread, the butter being also exhausted. 
Billy went all over the canon in the 
afternoon, in a vain attempt to shoot 
something for our next meal. He had 
absolutely no success. Monday morning 
came and we stayed in bed as late as 
possible, feeling rather hungry by this 
time. Breakfast was a fresh shock to us, 
for even the dry bread was failing us 



a mother's guardianship 63 

now ! Billy, with an assumption of 
sulky bravado which was intended to 
hide his very real mortification, put 
down a piece of very dry bread, certainly 
not so large as the palm of my hand and 
said, " There ! you two ladies had better 
settle with a six-shooter, which of you is 
to eat that — there isn't enough for 
both ! " Things were really looking 
rather desperate ; all the more so because 
we had naturally lost all confidence in 
the man at Peach Springs and yet were 
completely at his mercy. Obviously we 
could not walk thirty-five miles back ; 
nor could I, in any case, have left my 
companion with a sprained ankle. We 
knew by this time how much faith to 
put in the man's promises and had there- 
fore no reason to suppose he would come 
for us on Monday, if it should suit him 
better to come the following day or even 
on Wednesday. We could only feel 
really certain that he would act in the 
matter entirely as best suited his con- 
venience and would have no more 
scruple in starving us for an extra 
day or two than he had shown in leav- 



64 BO THfc DEAD DEPART? 

ing one day's provisions for a three 
days' stay. 

It was really a case of " not knowing 
where your next meal would come from," 
and as such was perhaps an experience 
worth having. There was literally not a 
crumb of bread left in the shanty and 
there was obviously no need for laying 
the cloth for dinner. The hours dragged 
wearily on and we felt more and more 
weak and helpless and depressed. Once 
more I appealed to my mother, " Do say 
something to cheer me, what is going to 
happen ? It is five o'clock now and there 
seems no hope of that wretched man com- 
ing for us ; it is getting too late for the 
long drive back ; we have had nothing 
but a few beans and a little dry bread 
since yesterday morning, and now we 
have nothing at all in the house, and a 
long night before us." 
^ In some such words I spoke to my 
mother and told her of our trouble. 

" Be patient," came the answer ; " your 
trouble is almost ended now. He is com- 
ing up the valley. He will be here within 
half an hour." 



A mother's guardianship 65 

It was just 5 : 30 p. m. when he appeared, 
bringing a piece of tough meat and some 
hard biscuits and a bottle of Californian 
port with him. He did not show the 
smallest sorrow for the discomfort entailed 
upon us by his niggardly carelessness, 
but calmly observed, " You may think 
yourselves lucky that I came at all to- 
day ; fact is I meant to wait till to- 
morrow, to drive a gentleman up here, 
but at the last moment he made up his 
mind to give it up ; so thought I might 
as well come to-day." 

We were so eager to get out of his 
clutches as quickly as possible that we 
would not even wait to have the very 
tough bit of meat cooked ; we drank the 
port and ate the biscuits and insisted 
upon being driven back at once to more 
civilized quarters, whilst Billy remained 
behind for the night to put things 
straight, and kept the meat for his share 
of the entertainment. We gave him a 
royal tip for his services and parted with 
mutual regret I think. I have often 
wondered what became of Billy. It was 
soon a question what would become of 



66 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

us! We sat up all night at Peach 
Springs for fear of losing our 4 a. m. 
train and we had not been an hour in 
our " sleepers " when a terrific jolt sent 
us flying to the bottom of our berths and 
made us fully aware that " something 
had happened." After some minutes of 
perfect silence and inaction, one imper- 
turbable American at length got up, 
yawned and stretched himself and said 
gently, " I guess I will just go round and 
see what is up ? " He returned shortly 
with the pleasing announcement that we 
had run into a freight train, gone off the 
track, that our engine was lying down the 
embankment " as flat as a pancake" and 
that the two baggage cars next to it were 
telescoped. He said words failed him to 
describe the state of the freight train and 
no wonder ! 

We got up and investigated for our- 
selves later and I can testify to the truth- 
ful description of our engine because I 
climbed down the embankment and saw 
it for myself. It seems that a very heavy 
freight train coming from San Francisco 
had had to be switched on to the line of 



A mothee's guakdianship 67 

our express going north. A signalman 
was sent off 1 a quarter of a mile, to signal 
our train, as it came round a particular 
curve. The man got tired of waiting, 
said he was afraid of wolves and calmly 
walked back, letting our " express " come 
on to destruction ! 

We dashed into the freight train but 
mercifully owing to the curve, were not 
going at our highest speed. The freight 
train was completely annihilated how- 
ever, and the debris was so great that our 
train had to return to Peach Springs and 
remain there till 11 p. m. that night 
whilst an extra track was made by a 
wrecking crew, to take us by a circuitous 
route round the scene of the collision. 

I have a nightmare recollection of that 
bit of the journey and our slow progress 
over the temporary rails. The night was 
very dark and only the flaring tow and 
pitch torches lit up the crowds of work- 
men and the endless tomato tins and 
other canned goods, diversified here and 
there by wrecked furniture and house- 
hold goods, which we passed on our 
perilous path. Here again the troubles 



68 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

of our journey were lightened for me by 
the recollection of my mother's true and 
reassuring prophecy and by the continu- 
ous consciousness of her presence with 
me. 



CHAPTER IV 

A CURIOUS ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT 
METHODS 

Although I have spoken so strongly 
against multiplying cases of psychic 
events, with the smallest hope that they 
can bring conviction to any single mind, 
I consider it permissible and advisable to 
illustrate one's own convictions occasion- 
ally, by giving the sort of facts that may 
have led to them in the first place and 
which continually arise in support of 
them. 

Far from regretting that stories of our 
own experiences cannot convince any- 
body else, I rejoice in it. What poor, 
flabby creatures our friends and neigh- 
bors would be were they capable of such 
easy manipulation ! And what a hetero- 
geneous mass of convictions they would 
hold, if they went much about the world 
and happened to possess the congenial 
69 



70 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

nature which attracts acquaintances and 
invites sympathy ! 

Personally I consider it a positive in- 
sult when people make an elaborate 
apology for not becoming instant con- 
verts to some of my most remarkable ex- 
periences. I can only most truthfully re- 
assure them by saying that I should hold 
them in the meanest contempt if their 
judgment and reason could be so easily 
captured. I go even further than this. 
I do not think that any fact can be, or 
ought to be, established upon the bona fides of 
even the most estimable character in the world. 
I resent the tyranny of " great names/' 
quite as much in this respect as in any 
other. There can be great names as re- 
gards character, or great names in social, 
scientific and philosophical circles. But 
to base a scientific fact upon character has 
always appeared to me ridiculous — and if 
psychic facts are not " scientific " so much 
the worse for them ! In saying this it is, 
" bien entendu" that science is capable of 
being legitimately stretched to the far side 
of Sir Ray Lankester, for example ! 

Yet we are constantly invited to give 



ILLUSTKATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 71 

credence to some " case," because it has 
been well attested by people of excep- 
tional " character." That is certainly a 
good ground for claiming respectful con- 
sideration ; nothing more. I knew Mr. 
Stainton Moses and had the greatest re- 
spect for him, but I decline to accept a fact 
solely upon the bona fides of Mr. Stainton 
Moses, and I think many people have 
been very unfairly handled because they 
have dared to discuss or criticise " facts " 
of a psychic nature testified to by some 
dead man or woman of irreproachable 
character. Such facts demand the serious 
attention of competent researchers. They 
do not demand instant acceptance, as 
anything beyond working hypotheses, for 
further personal investigation. 

Putting aside the really irreproachable 
and truly accurate witnesses, we have, in 
quite unprofessional circles, the pseudo 
irreproachable and accurate people whose 
accuracy is beyond human description, 
and who have proved themselves capable 
of deceiving even the very elect in that 
stronghold of level-headed criticism — 
The Society for Psychical Research. 



72 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

I speak in parables ; but the older 
members of that society will sorrowfully 
acknowledge to themselves the truth of 
my words. 

Therefore let us dismiss in these mat- 
ters the sentimentality connected with 
great names (morally speaking), and 
acknowledge once for all that apart from 
the question of respectful attention, the 
" irreproachable one" has no more reason 
to claim acceptance of his fact on the 
score of his general character than a 
chemist would have, to present the same 
plea, in favor of his researches. 

And now to return to my little bit of 
personal history as regards the watchful 
care of our friends on the other side. In 
this case I was the percipient and not 
the object of their ministrations. About 
eighteen months ago I was spending some 
weeks in London during the dull and 
rainy autumn months, and one Saturday 
evening a sudden thought came to me 
that it would be advisable to go and see 
the recently opened Westminster Cathe- 
dral the following afternoon. Although 
with no leanings toward Roman Ca- 



ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 73 

tholicism, I often spend a spare half-hour 
in the Brompton Oratory, because I find 
the spiritual atmosphere there very help- 
ful. I had, however, no special interest 
in the new cathedral at the time and the 
idea of visiting it on that special day 
came to me rather " out of the blue," as 
it were. However I determined to carry 
out the suggestion and on my way to 
the Gloucester Road District Railway, 
thought for the first time that I could com- 
bine the visit with a cup of tea later in 
Ashley Gardens, where I have an old 
" young " friend. Now I wish to make 
clear that the Westminster Cathedral idea 
'preceded the Ashley Gardens idea by some 
hours — in fact a whole night. 

It rather surprised me at the time that 
this should have been the case as I knew 
the Ashley Gardens friend very well and 
have often stayed in her flat. However 
such was the case. I left the train at 
Victoria Station and made my way to the 
Roman Catholic Cathedral where I spent 
the best part of an hour. Coming out I 
found that the day, not very pleasant to 
start with, had become distinctly dis- 



74 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

agreeable, cold and windy and with a 
threatening of rain. 

I hurried on to my friend's flat, rejoic- 
ing in the knowledge that she was always 
" at home " on Sunday afternoons. 

To my disgust and astonishment the 
porter said that Miss Lloyd was not at 
home. I stared at him in astonishment. 
" Do you mean that she has not yet re- 
turned to town ? " It was well on toward 
winter, so this possibility had not even 
occurred to me. 

" Oh, yes, she came back some weeks 
ago, madam ; but she is out of town for a 
few days — gone to Berkshire, I think." 

There was nothing for it but to return 
to Queen's Gate Gardens as quickly as 
possible and by degrees as I neared the 
station once more, the vision of my com- 
fortable sitting-room with blazing fire and 
plenty of interesting books to read, quite 
dispelled my passing disappointment. 
But as I reached the Victoria Station, a 
curious thing happened. A strong and 
distinct mental impression came to me 
that I must turn back. " There is some 
one else you ought to see " was the form in 



ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 75 

which it came. As a mere matter of per- 
sonal preference I should certainly have 
discarded any such suggestion at the 
time. It was already nearly five o'clock 
and cold and windy in addition. Still 
the feeling was strongly upon me that I 
"ought" to turn round. So I walked 
down Victoria Street, pondering whom I 
knew there and whom I ought to go and 
see. I could think only of Lady Russell 
(the wife of Sir W. Howard Russell) who 
had asked me to call upon her years be- 
fore, which I had never yet done. It 
seemed absurd to do so now, after so long 
an interval, so I dismissed that idea. 
Next came into my mind a very intelli- 
gent young lady, a member of Canon 
Wilberforce's congregation whom I knew 
slightly and who lived certainly in Vic- 
toria Street. I was almost at her door 
when it struck me forcibly that there was 
really no reason for my calling upon her 
at such a late hour and thus delaying my 
return home ; so I deliberately turned 
round and walked back in the direction 
of the station once more. Just before ar- 
riving at the entrance, a still stronger im- 



76 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

pression came to me in these words, heard 
by the inner ear, " You have forgotten 
somebody — think once more. 11 I turned 
mechanically and walked back for two 
or three minutes, both puzzled and cross, 
if the truth must be told. Then it flashed 
upon me that I had forgotten a third lady 
living close by, whom I had known for 
some years past but not at all intimately. 
She is a very pretty and charming woman, 
well placed socially, and I had always 
supposed one to be greatly envied, as an 
especially happy wife and mother. I 
have had no reason to alter my opinion 
so far as these domestic details are con- 
cerned. 

Perhaps rather superficially, I had 
thought of her only as one of the charm- 
ing people who add to the grace and de- 
light of life but who have never had oc- 
casion to probe its deeper and more sorrow- 
ful paths. She is certainly the very last 
person I should have associated with any 
deep sorrow or anxiety. 

At this point I should like to say that 
this lady has most kindly given me per- 
mission to relate the following experience, 



ILLTJSTKATION OF SPIHIT METHODS 77 

upon my request that she would do so, if 
possible, as it may so greatly help others 
to realize the practical protection and 
guidance ever round them in times of 
difficulty and sorrow. None of the cir- 
cumstances or localities have been altered. 
The names of Miss Lloyd and this lady, 
whom I will call Mrs. Mansfield, have 
alone been changed. I suggested chang- 
ing the Westminster Cathedral episode 
but she considers this unnecessary. 

To proceed with my story. There was 
some little delay in getting the elevator 
and the late hour made me once more anx- 
ious to get home as the repeated im- 
pression was again weakening and I mur- 
mured " self-suggestion" as I sat waiting 
in the hall. In fact I was trying to find 
the porter's wife to tell her I could not 
wait longer, when she appeared from the 
back premises and announced the arrival 
of Mrs. Mansfield's maid, who had come 
down to take me up, in the absence of 
the porter. 

This decided the question and I was 
soon seated in Mrs. Mansfield's pretty flat, 
drinking a much-needed cup of tea. 



78 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

She was as bright and genial as ever 
and begged me to stay on for a little after 
other visitors had departed. 

There are weird stories connected with 
some of these flats and she asked me 
laughingly whether I felt anything pecul- 
iar in the atmosphere. 

Now almost as soon as I had finished 
my tea, I had been conscious of a nervous 
headache coming on, which by the time 
she said this, had become very acute and 
most painful. A really bad headache is 
a very rare occurrence with me, I am 
thankful to say, and I do not have such 
a thing once in two or three years as a 
rule. It was becoming so painful on this 
occasion that I was obliged to tell her so 
quite frankly and take my leave as soon 
as the elevator could be procured. As I 
said good-bye she made another laughing 
remark, after expressing concern about 
my head. " Do find out if there is any- 
thing connected with the flat that is un- 
canny. Perhaps some murder has been 
committed just where you sat when your 
headache came on so suddenly ! " As a 
matter of fact I had been sitting next to 



ILLUSTRATION OP SPIRIT METHODS 79 

her on the sofa ever since I had entered 
the flat. My violent headache still con- 
tinued in spite of the open air and I was 
very thankful to find myself at home I 
lay down on a Chesterfield couch and 
closed my eyes ; but the pain was still so 
bad that at last in despair I went to the 
writing-table and asked if there were any 
explanation of the matter and any possible 
truth in Mrs. Mansfield's joke about the 
flat having been the scene of any past 
tragedy ? The answer came at once and 
was certainly practical. " Wait till you 
have had your supper. We cannot say 
more at present — you are too much ex- 
hausted. We are very sorry to have 
caused you suffering but it was so hard to 
make you attend and understand. We 
could only do so by pressure on the brain 
itself and this caused the trouble, we 
suppose. We could not get through to 
you in any other way to-day and it is 
most important. Take our message 
later." 

The moment I had taken even thus 
much, the pressure and tension in my head 
were greatly relieved. In fact although 



80 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

tired, the headache had disappeared before 
I went down to supper ; a point which I 
commend to the consideration of the 
candid inquirer. An hour later I came 
back, greatly refreshed by the food, and 
sat down to take the important message 
which had been intimated. This was 
most carefully worded so as to give me 
no slightest clue to the affairs of Mrs. 
Mansfield, but the opening sentence was 
a very curious one. 

I said, " Now do tell me about the flat. 
Was there any murder committed there 
and did you wish to impress me about it 
as a test ? " 

The answer was, " We know nothing 
about the previous history of the flat you 
mention; many tragic events may have 
happened on the site where it stands or in 
the rooms themselves. We have no concern 
and no knowledge about this." 

" Then why did this terrible headache 
come on ? " was my next question. 

" Because you were sitting next to a very 
unhappy woman and we wanted to help her 
through you and found it hard to impress 
you y as we are strange to you" 



ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 81 

A message was then given, most care- 
fully worded, as I have already said, and 
giving no sort of detail as to the causes 
of the misery to which they referred. In 
fact they said quite plainly, " We do not 
wish to discuss her affairs with a compara- 
tive stranger, but we were drawn to you 
through your acquaintance with her and 
saw that you could be employed to give her 
incontestible proof of our loving help in this 
time of terrible strain and grief. We wish 
you to write to her at once and to tell her 
truthfully and in detail the whole history of 
this afternoon and just how you were led t 
step by step, to her door, apart from any 
special wish to call upon her to-day. We 
could not get the idea straight into your 
head at once as we have explained. It was 
a complicated affair but this is all the better 
except for your own physical suffering, be- 
cause she will realize the various steps which 
were necessary. First came the suggestion 
of the cathedral service — next of your old 
friend in the neighborhood. When that 
failed we had great difficulty in keeping you 
from going home at once. We had still 
more difficulty in getting the name of our 



82 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

charge through to you. In fact this was 
only achieved by a process of elimination. 
There were two mistaken self-suggestions to 
be dispersed before you realized the right 
person. Even then you were on the eve of 
giving it up, for we could not make the im- 
pression strong enough. This is why ive 
were obliged to use an amount of pressure 
which, translated on to the physical plane, 
brought suffering to your head. Do not 
fear to send the message. You will hear 
of its truth and will not then regret your ex- 
pedition." 

I have explained that Mrs. Mansfield 
was, and still is, a friendly acquaintance 
rather than an intimate friend, and it 
was anything but pleasant for me to re- 
ceive such a commission. 

At the worst she might think that I 
was trying to worm myself into her con- 
fidence. At the best, she would probably 
look upon it as an idle freak of my im- 
agination. 

So far as her personality was concerned, 
I could not have received a message ap- 
parently more wide of the mark ; but I 
was certainly impressed by the straight- 



ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 83 

forward and sensible way in which her 
guardian spirits had explained their 
action and the steps forced upon them 
through my own stupidity. They were 
polite enough to suggest a reason for 
this latter in the fact that they were 
working through a hitherto unknown 
channel. 

It only remains to say that by return 
of post I received a most grateful and 
charming letter from Mrs. Mansfield. 
She said, " It is all quite true," and then 
went on to refer in very touching words 
to the fact of a great sorrow and testing- 
time in her life, adding that no doubt it 
was necessary discipline and expressing 
great thankfulness for the undeniable 
proof she had received in so strange a 
way of help and guidance during her 
conflict. 

As Mrs! Mansfield will certainly see 
this record of my experience, I think my 
readers may be sure that my story is 
correct, and they will — I have no doubt 
— -join with me in feeling grateful to her 
for her generous permission that this 
true incident should be related for the 



84 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

encouragement of others when passing 
through deep waters of trial or tempta- 
tion. 

Surely such a case is just one of those 
where we can help our fellow-creatures 
through our own suffering, if we are 
capable of putting personal preferences 
in the background and our duty to our 
neighbor in the van. 

The hosts of the Lord " encompass us 
always round about," but our eyes are 
generally holden that we do not see and 
our ears are deaf that we do not hear. 

Surely if any one of us can catch a flash 
or hear a sound, however feebly, from 
that encamping army, the least we can 
do is to carry the glad news to our neigh- 
bors. It is open to them to receive or re- 
ject the testimony. 

At the time of writing this chapter, I 
am reading a new book, dated 1907, by 

Note. — It will be at once suggested as an " explanation " 
that I received a telepathic impression of Mrs. Mansfield's 
state of mind subconsciously whilst sitting by her side. 
But my reader has still to ' ' explain ' ' the various steps by 
which I was sent so unwillingly into the flat that afternoon. 
Subconscious telepathy from Mrs. Mansfield perhaps ? That 
only makes the problem more complicated and the solution 
less probable. 



ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 85 

David P. Abbott, entitled Behind the Scenes 
with Mediums. Such a book is un- 
doubtedly a most useful " drag " upon 
overcredulity in investigators. We must 
however keep a perfectly level head in 
these questions and be on our guard also 
against overcredulity in explanations. Mr. 
Abbott has been remarkably unfortunate 
in never finding a single genuine medium 
during the whole of his investigation and 
therefore is very naturally prejudiced in 
favor of his own explanations as covering 
the whole ground. Where these explana- 
tions consist in " palming cards,' ' sub- 
stituting dummy papers for those contain- 
ing questions and so forth, I bow as a lay- 
man to the dicta of an expert conjurer 
and trickster. 

But when I find that this gentleman 
has never received a single " test " that 
could not have been easily obtained 
through a City Directory concealed below 
the platform or in the rear of the audi- 
ence, then I feel I must get a good grip 
upon my credulity and not allow it to run 
away with my judgment. 

A City Directory and an elaborate 



86 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

" book of mediums " carefully kept and 
passed on secretly to each newcomer, may 
explain a great deal under the conditions 
of provincial American life and yet fail 
to explain other experiences which some 
of us have had under widely differing 
conditions. In my own remarkable ex- 
periences in materialization during my 
first visit to America it was not the ap- 
pearance of my friends in very fair light 
which astonished me, abnormal as this 
may have been ; it was their intimate 
knowledge of " trivial matters " which they 
and they alone could have known, had they 
been the persons they professed to be. 

Now this point is scarcely ever noticed, 
certainly never emphasized in any " ex- 
planations " of materialization which I 
have read. We are always told how " the 
form " can be built up, thanks to expand- 
ing sticks and lazy tongs and pink silk 
masks and muslin and so forth, and per- 
sonally I feel most thankful for all these 
useful hints and have always allowed for 
such possibilities. Again when various 
departed friends have made themselves 
known to me and spoken of matters 



ILLUSTRATION OF SPIRIT METHODS 87 

known only to themselves and me and 
yet matters of the most trifling intrinsic 
importance, I have always been on the 
alert to imagine collusion, where such ex- 
periences have been repeated in the house 
of some other medium. Before I had 
been told as a matter of fact that such rec- 
ords were kept and exchanged amongst 
mediums, even in such large cities as 
New York and Boston, this very obvious 
possibility had occurred to me. At the 
same time I was logical enough to realize 
that this did not and could not account 
for the first experience. How did that come 
about ? When people at once suggested 
the employment of detectives from Eng- 
land to put these mediums au courant 
with insignificant and trifling events in my 
life, covering the scenes of my childhood, 
some 3,000 miles distant in space and 
some thirty years distant in time — well, 
such explanations seemed to me both 
ridiculous and insulting to 'my intelli- 
gence. We must always remember that 
from the evidential point of view, trifles 
are obviously of far greater value than 
the more marked events of a life. In 



88 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

fact we may put it that metapsychic 
evidence increases in importance in direct 
inverse ratio to its " face value." 

These are the facts which need " ex- 
plaining," far more than the muslin and 
the masks ; as to which latter most of us 
nowadays have few illusions. 

In some of the very kindly and genial 
reviews of Seen and Unseen I was amused 
by the inference that some of the more 
obvious " explanations," telepathic and 
otherwise, had never entered my head. I 
think it may safely be taken for granted 
that any intelligent investigator of many 
years' standing, has either heard or read 
all the " explanations " that it has as yet 
entered into the heart of man to con- 
ceive. Also I think by this time it may 
be safely conceded that " sensitiveness to 
impressions " does not invariably imply 
mental degeneracy and is sometimes to 
be found amongst otherwise level-headed 
men and women. A tropical imagination 
will run wild whether you are a psychic 
or cannot even spell the word, far less 
realize its meaning. But it is also pos- 
sible to possess the great blessing of 



iLLtTSTKATiOtf OF SPIKIT METHODS 89 

imagination and yet be competent to 
drive your own horses instead of being 
run away with by them. Some people 
have no horses to drive, in which case 
they must remain in the coach, comfort- 
ably housed and sheltered and padded 
but without any means of progress. 
The almost universal outside opinion at 
present is this : given a pair of horses 
and it follows, as the night the day, that 
they are running away with you and 
that you have no power to control 
them. What would a country squire 
say to such an argument against hav- 
ing a stable? Then why should it 
be used continually, and without pro- 
test, about all " sensitives," as they are 
called? 

To be aware of an outside impression 
and to be dominated by it are two very 
different things — in many cases two con- 
tradictory things. It is the people who 
do not know whence their impressions 
come who are liable to be at the mercy 
of them. If a woman has proved herself 
sensible and level-headed in other mat- 
ters, no one has a right to assume in an 



90 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

arbitrary and dogmatic manner that she 
must of necessity lose these qualities the 
moment she affirms something which 
you do not understand. By doing so 
you make a cul-de-sac of that which 
ought to be one day a thoroughfare for 
all the world to walk in. 

As an instance of the sort of fact that 
cannot be covered by any ingenious 
theory of the excitation of " old impres- 
sions left on the brain structure," or 
" telepathic transmission " (within sane 
limitations), or " imagination run wild," 
I would remind my readers of the well- 
known and well-attested case in the 
archives of the Society for Psychical 
Research. 

I refer to the case of a percipient well 
known both to Professor Royce and to 
my friend Dr. Hodgson of Boston. This 
percipient, whilst on a business expedi- 
tion to a distant city, suddenly saw the 
form of his dead sister, in such material 
fashion that he sprang forward with 
delight, calling her by name, whereupon 
she vanished instantly in truly ghostly 
fashion. But the vital point in the story 



ILLUSTKATION OF SPIKIT METHODS 91 

comes later. In relating the occurrence 
to his parents, on his return home, he 
mentioned particularly a bright red line 
or scratch which he had noticed upon his 
sister's face. I will finish the story in 
his own words. 

" When I mentioned this, my mother 
rose trembling to her feet and nearly 
fainted away, and as soon as she 
sufficiently recovered her self-possession, 
with tears streaming down her face, she 
exclaimed that I had indeed seen my 
sister, as no living mortal but herself was 
aware of the scratch, which she had 
accidentally made whilst doing some little 
act of kindness after my sister's death. 
In proof, neither my father nor any of 
our family had detected it, and positively 
were unaware of the incident ; yet I saw 
the scratch as bright as if just made. So 
strangely impressed was my mother, that 
even after she had retired to rest, she 
got up and dressed, came to me and 
told me she knew that I had seen my 
sister. A few weeks later my mother 
died." 

This is the sort of fact we want to have 



92 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

explained to us, when the explainers 
have finished explaining the far more 
obvious and less interesting phenomena 
of " Masks and Faces ! " 



CHAPTER V 

BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 

A book upon psychic subjects, however 
short and unpretentious, can scarcely ig- 
nore the very numerous references to 
these matters which are so freely scat- 
tered over the Bible, more especially, of 
course, in the New Testament. 

This fact has been so fully and exhaust- 
ively treated by numerous earnest stu- 
dents who have given us more or less 
comprehensive statistics, that I do not 
propose to give more than a passing 
glance to the Biblical events, but I should 
like to speak at greater length upon the 
curious yet undeniable fact that, as a rule, 
no body of men deprecate more fiercely 
any attempt to parallel what happened in 
New Testament days with what is hap- 
pening now, than orthodox Christians 
and orthodox clergymen. They appear 
to regard any such remarks as irreverent 
and blasphemous and unless we have a 
93 



94 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

very polemical turn of mind we shall cer- 
tainly, as a matter of courtesy and polite- 
ness, refrain from emphasizing the fact 
that modern psychology is simply the 
outcome and continuity of the psychology 
to be met with from the first chapter of 
the Gospel according to St. Matthew to 
the last chapter of the Revelation of St. 
John the Divine. 

But let us begin with the Old Testa- 
ment. We have the well-known instance 
in the second book of the Kings, where 
Elisha the prophet wanted the King of 
Israel to avoid certain places where the 
enemy (the King of Syria) was about to 
pitch his tent. Again and again we are 
told the King of Israel profited by being 
thus put in possession of facts, spoken of 
only in the secrecy of the King of Syria's 
bedchamber. 

Later, when the hostile king, hearing 
by whom he had been betrayed, sent a 
great host of horses and chariots to 
Dothan, to surround and capture the 
prophet, and the servant or minister of 
the latter became unduly alarmed, we all 
know what happened. Elisha prayed 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 95 

earnestly that the eyes of the young man's 
spirit body might be opened so that he 
should be able to see that the mountain 
was full of horses and chariots of fire 
round about the prophet, and that the 
army of protection was stronger than the 
army of destruction. 

Then we have Jacob's vision of angels 
ascending and descending the Ladder in 
his dream and his wrestling all night 
through with the mysterious angel at 
Peniel. We have the innumerable visions 
of the prophet Ezekiel where again and 
again he speaks of the dealings of " the 
spirit " with him. 

To take an example at random. " Then 
the spirit took me up, and I heard behind 
the voice of a great rushing. ... I 
heard also the noise of the wings of the 
living creatures that touched one another 
and the noise of the wheels over against 
them and a noise of a great rushing. So 
the spirit lifted me up and took me away 
and I went in bitterness, in the heat of my 
spirit. . . ." Again he tells us of an 
appearance, " as a fire and amber " that 
" put forth the form of an hand and took 



96 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

him by a lock of his head and brought 
him in a vision to Jerusalem ; " to see the 
image of Jealousy at the gate of the altar, 
looking northward. 

The whole book of Ezekiel is full of 
such visions and such experiences, involv- 
ing clairvision, clairaudience and levita- 
tion. 

These things happened in the time of 
Ezekiel and were perfectly legitimate. 
They do not happen nowadays and they are 
illegitimate. It is this double and simul- 
taneous assertion which is so very puz- 
zling. Yet I have heard devout and 
otherwise quite intelligent persons affirm 
again and again that psychic events do 
not take place and are exceedingly wrong 
and devilish ! I do not mean to say that 
the two propositions are always made in 
the same sentence ; but I can stake my 
reputation upon it, that I have heard 
them again and again, by the same per- 
son, within five or ten minutes. 

To resume. We are told that Solomon 
received the pattern of the Temple, of the 
courts and the chambers, and the treasuries 
from his father ; and that David in turn 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 97 

had received those plans from a spiritual 
source. 

We have Joseph claiming for himself 
powers of divination, and Daniel receiv- 
ing great gifts and much honor as a re- 
vealer of secrets. 

Later we hear of the famous Feast of 
Belshazzar when the king saw the "fingers 
of a man's hand " materializing and writing 
the doom of his kingdom " on the plaister 
of the wall of the palace." 

It has always seemed to me, by the bye, 
that although Belshazzar was overcome 
by pride and ambition, and forgetful of 
the God " in whose hand his breath lay," 
he must have had some fine and generous 
instincts or the prophet of evil omen 
might have shared the usual fate of those 
who do not prophesy smooth things ; 
whereas Daniel was clothed in scarlet 
with a chain of gold about his neck and 
made third ruler, by the king's orders, in 
the kingdom the latter was so soon to 
lose. That King Darius should exalt 
Daniel to be first president in his newly- 
acquired kingdom is quite natural. The 
prophecy of doom to Belshazzar was a 



98 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

prophecy of power and dominion to him. 
Therefore I think Belshazzar proved him- 
self in this instance the nobler man of the 
two. Also he took Daniel's prophecy on 
trust and ordered these honors for 
him before that prophecy was fulfilled. 
Whereas Darius allowed himself to be 
hoodwinked by a very clumsy device for 
the destruction of Daniel, and did not 
dare to deliver the prophet of the Lord 
from prison and cast his accusers into it, 
until the prophet had given very con- 
vincing ocular demonstration of his 
supernormal powers in claiming Divine 
protection. 

The accounts of physical manifestations 
in the Bible are too numerous to need 
much emphasis. We have the two ma- 
terializations just mentioned : of the form 
of a hand and the form of a finger in the 
case of Ezekiel ; and the materialized 
fingers of a man's hand in the palace of 
Belshazzar. We have the angel who re- 
leased St. Peter from prison, the angels 
who rolled away the stone from the door 
of the Sepulchre, the " cloven tongues of 
fire " and the " rushing mighty wind " 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 99 

which filled the house at Pentecost, and 
the shaking of the house on other oc- 
casions when the disciples were gathered 
together for prayer, and the Holy Spirit 
gave them " great power " to testify to the 
Resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ. 

We have Balaam falling into a trance 
with his eyes open and then taking up 
his parable at the word of the Lord and 
blessing Israel instead of cursing the 
people at the instigation of their enemy 
Balak. 

We have descriptions of the trances of 
Ezekiel in full detail. We hear of St. 
Peter falling into a trance on the house- 
top and receiving his grand lesson on the 
unity and value of life and of St. Paul 
falling into a trance in the Temple when 
he returned to Jerusalem after his famous 
vision in the neighborhood of Damascus. 
St. Paul speaks of his trances when he 
was caught up into the third heaven and 
heard " unspeakable words." 

There are several cases of levitation in 
the Bible in addition to the one already 
mentioned with regard to Ezekiel. Philip 
was " caught away " by the spirit of the 



100 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

Lord and found later at Azotus. Elijah 
was parted from Elisha and carried away 
in a chariot of fire ; and other instances 
may be quoted from the same source. 

All of us who have had any experience 
in psychical research must have come 
across instances of spirit lights. These 
are generally put down in every final 
fashion to " phosphorous and fraud, " but 
many of us can see these spirit lights 
without any assistance from professional 
mediums. It is so in my own case. 
Some years ago I had an interesting ex- 
perience, when I had gone with Admiral 
Usborne Moore to introduce him in a pri- 
vate house where a seance was to be held. 

For many years I have given up phe- 
nomenal research, having satisfied myself 
of the residuum of truth in such manifes- 
tations, after making all due allowance 
for occasional and undeniable deception. 
I went therefore upon this occasion with 
a special object in view. 

Soon after the sitting began, the whole 
side of the room where the cabinet was 
placed was lighted up by the most mag- 
nificent display of a soft and yet brilliant 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 101 

violet light. It was so beautiful and so 
unmistakable that I could not resist whis- 
pering to the admiral, " What an ex- 
quisite light, is it not?" He made no 
answer and I concluded that he did not 
wish to be disturbed and was afraid of 
having his attention distracted, for a mo- 
ment even, from the proceedings. It 
never occurred to me that he did not see 
what I saw and therefore could not under- 
stand the meaning of my question ! For 
this was not a case of a small flashing 
light such as I often see and recognize as 
probably visible to myself alone. It was 
a broad expanse of the most beautiful 
violet light, illuminating the whole cabi- 
net and that part of the room in general. 
Even now I find it difficult to believe 
that any one in the room could have 
failed to see such a brilliant and exten- 
sive coloring. Yet the fact remains that 
amongst some twenty sitters or more, the 
lady of the house and I were the only 
two people who had seen the light. The 
others probably thought we were roman- 
cing or suffering from hallucination — not 
phosphorous in this case ! 



102 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

The spirit lights mentioned in the 
Bible are too numerous for quotation. 
We can begin with Moses and the burn- 
ing bush — or with the smoking furnace 
and the burning lamp seen by Abraham 
when the horror of great darkness fell 
upon him, on the same day that the 
Lord made a covenant with him. 

We read also of the pillar of fire which 
guided the Israelites in the land of Egypt 
by night but became at the same time a 
cloud and darkness to their enemies, so 
that " the two camps came not near each 
other all night." 

Of course the transcendent example of 
shining spirit light was on the Mount of 
Transfiguration when our Lord was trans- 
figured in the presence of St. Peter, St. 
James and St. John, and Moses and Elias 
appeared, talking with Him. We are told 
that a bright cloud overshadowed them 
all and the disciples became clairaudient 
— the ears of their spirit bodies being 
opened. This clairaudience had a terri- 
fying effect upon the three disciples, who 
fell on their faces and were sore afraid. 
It was only when Jesus touched and re- 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 103 

assured them that they had courage to 
open their eyes, when they found that 
the abnormal sight as well as sound had 
disappeared and u they saw no man, save 
Jesus only." 

The Reverend Arthur Chambers, in 
his new book, Problems of the Spiritual, 
makes a very interesting and pertinent 
suggestion with regard to this story of the 
Transfiguration. He says, " May there 
not have been a significance in our Lord 
selecting only three of the Apostolic men 
to be the witnesses of the manifestation of 
departed Moses on the mountain of Trans- 
figuration ? May not St. Peter, St. James 
and St. John, alone of the twelve, have 
possessed the psychic powers which made 
the revelation possible to them, whilst 
not possible to others ? " This seems a 
very legitimate question. 

Our Lord appears to have worked al- 
ways through the limitations of earth 
conditions, even when employing the 
advanced powers of humanity. He re- 
quired faith as the most necessary of all 
conditions for the working of the higher 
forces, and quite frankly told His dis- 



104 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

ciples that their results would and must 
be in proportion to their faith. This be- 
ing the case, it is surely very conceivable 
that He should have chosen from the 
disciples for this great experience those 
who were physically and psychically best 
fitted to realize it ? I am using the word 
physically, of course, in the sense of the 
higher physics. At present we only know 
the psychic temperament by its results 
and don't know enough of the properties 
of etheric matter to formulate any opinion 
as to how far this temperamental develop- 
ment is due to special mental, and how 
far to special " higher physical/' condi- 
tions, in persons who are found to be 
mediumistic. Mr. Chambers suggests 
that one of the various reasons why our 
departed friends cannot always manifest 
themselves to us may be that we are so 
psychically undeveloped as to render 
such a course impossible. People are 
so apt to say, " If the dead can return 
as you say, why does not my husband or 
my father or my mother or my child 
come back and prove it to me?" And 
these questions are sometimes, from their 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 105 

very crudity, difficult to answer without 
hurting the feelings of the questioner. 
How can they come back unless we make 
some sort of conditions for their recep- 
tion? The very people who ask this 
question so glibly have probably never 
dreamed of setting apart even ten minutes 
in the day for silent meditation on their 
beloved ones, with the view of giving any 
reasonable condition for their return. I 
know that I am right in saying this for 
whenever I have suggested such a simple 
and obvious proceeding I have been 
thanked in a manner indicating that 
the thought of anything so practical 
has been presented to them for the first 
time. 

Again some of those who have left us 
may not themselves be specially gifted 
in the way of psychic communication, 
which seems to present as many difficult- 
ies (and difficulties of much the same 
quality) on the other side of the Veil, as 
on our side. Then again some of our 
friends are enjoying a well-earned and 
much-needed rest and we have not the 
power, even had we the wish, to disturb 



106 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

them. Others again may have been near 
us and longing to make themselves known 
under the new conditions, but month 
after month or year after year may have 
passed, during which we were ignorant, 
or indifferent or prejudiced and therefore 
blind and deaf and incapable. Then a 
little light gleams upon us and perhaps 
by that time our loved ones have passed 
on into higher spheres of existence, where 
they can no longer reach us through 
physical manifestation. We are not 
sufficiently spiritually developed per- 
haps to be able to follow them on any 
spiritual or even mental plane. Like 
Thomas we crave for physical proof 
which we could not or would not accept 
when it was possible for us. Later we feel 
much aggrieved that no sign comes to 
us, in the special way which we dictate, 
and we use this fact as an argument 
against the truth of any spirit inter- 
course. " If they could come they would 
come." " If my father and mother don't 
come to me, that proves that nobody's 
father and mother can come to their 
children. If other people think they 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 107 

have had such experiences it must be 
purely subjective speculation and the 
result of disordered nerves and hallucina- 
tion." This is the usual argument used 
and it is, at any rate, very final, if not 
entirely convincing. 

A few theological " bogies " still remain 
to be " laid " before the more timid and 
the more conscientious inquirers can be 
encouraged to see for themselves if it be 
not possible to hold helpful and comfort- 
ing communion with their departed 
friends. 

The special circumstances under which 
the prohibitions of the Mosaic law were 
uttered to ancient Israel have again and 
again been made very clear. 

Here was a race, at that time in a very 
low moral and social condition, very 
materialistic and elementary in most of 
its conceptions, demoralized by the in- 
fluences of foreign captivity and given to 
idolatry, quite incapable therefore of any 
high spiritual ideals. Such a race would 
of necessity be specially susceptible of all 
low and undeveloped influences on the 
well-known principle of like attracting 



108 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

like. The Israelites moreover were jour- 
neying through hostile lands and were 
forced to mark their progress by shedding 
the blood of their foes. These latter were 
falling in thousands before them, being 
hurried into the next sphere in a crude, 
elementary state, full of hatred and re- 
venge toward their conquerors. 

No wonder that a wise lawgiver, know- 
ing something of occult science, should 
promulgate most stringent laws, with the 
most severe penalties against any opening 
of the doors between the two spheres of 
existence ; doors through which at that time 
and under those circumstances, only evil and 
malignant spirits were likely to throng. The 
marvel would have been if these strong 
prohibitions had not been sent forth. Cer- 
tainly such an omission would have said 
little for the wisdom and forethought of 
their Ruler. 

But to hurl this prohibition down all the 
centuries as binding upon all nations, at all 
times and under all possible circumstances, 
is absurd and unreasonable. 

In times of war and disturbance our 
ports must of necessity be closed against 



BIBLICAL INCIDENTS 109 

all foreign ships. This might just as 
reasonably be made a final argument 
against all international intercourse dur- 
ing the whole existence of our planet. 
To suppose that God should allow devils 
a free pass but prohibit departed saints 
from using the open door between the 
spheres is a reductio ad-abmrdum. Yet 
many people practically tell us that this 
is really the case. They say they believe 
in the communion of saints, but if any 
modern instance of any such communion 
takes place, even between an excarnate 
saint and an incarnate one, you are told 
at once that the excarnate saint must be 
an impostor and a devil and the incarnate 
one a credulous fool, if no worse. 

Why are we told to " try the spirits"? 
Why are we given a test by which we 
may discriminate between the true and 
the false if all who come through that 
open door are alike wicked impostors ? 
If the Mosaic law still holds good, why 
not be consistent with our belief and in- 
sist upon a big bonfire for our Bond Street 
clairvoyants and mediums ? 

" The moral sense would be against 



110 DO THE DEAD DEPAET ? 

any such drastic measures and would not 
permit them for a moment." Then can- 
not the moral common sense admit that we 
are not living in the fifteenth century nor 
in Salem, Massachusetts ; but in a more 
enlightened and humane age, thank 
God ! and that instead of collecting fag- 
gots and burning our mediums, we prefer 
to collect facts by investigating them? 



CHAPTER VI 

CLAIKVOYANCE 

I should like to say something now 
upon the subject of clairvoyance. For 
me this question is always bound up with 
that wider question, " What is the spirit 
body ? " 

St. Paul has done his best to tell us 
something about this in the fifteenth 
chapter of the first epistle to the Corin- 
thians, where he distinctly says that there 
is (not shall be) a spiritual as well as a 
natural body. He speaks of the resur- 
rection of the dead — not the resurrection 
of the flesh. He tells us that it is the 
natural body which is sown (in the grave) 
in corruption ; to be raised in incorrup- 
tion when the spirit body has thrown off 
the mortal and enveloping coil ; and he 
closes this part of his subject by the dis- 
tinct assertion that flesh and blood can- 
not inherit the kingdom of God nor can 
corruption inherit incorruption. This 
111 



112 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

seems sufficiently plain and sensible and 
in support of it we have the experiences 
of many seers who have been able to dis- 
tinguish this ethereal or spirit body as it 
was withdrawn, shortly after death, from 
the physical body, before the burial of 
the latter. 

The famous Doctor Gully of Malvern 
(the father of Lord Selby), had some ex- 
tremely interesting drawings litho- 
graphed, which had been made by a 
young child he knew, and chosen out 
from a large quantity which were equally 
suggestive. Oddly enough, I was first 
introduced to these pictures when living 
with the mother of Sir Ray Lankester ! 

The story connected with them was 
quite a romance. The little artist's 
grandmother had been deeply and hope- 
lessly loved by a young man in the days 
of her youth. She married some one 
else, but he remained faithful. In the 
course of time a daughter was born to 
her who became a great pet with the 
disconsolate lover who seems to have 
been accepted later as " ami de la 
rnaison" Years passed and in due 



CLAIRVOYANCE 113 

course this daughter also married, and 
she had a daughter — the little girl who 
drew the pictures. 

By this time the grandmother was 
dead and the faithful lover had become 
an old and infirm man, no longer able to 
visit the daughter of his old love and 
therefore quite unknown to her children. 
Meanwhile the little granddaughter had 
shown no marked talent for drawing. 
The old gentleman died when she was 
about twelve years old and the curious 
coincidence (?) lay in the fact that 
within three months of his death, this 
little girl, who had never personally 
known him, suddenly developed a taste 
and talent for drawing most weird and 
impressive pictures of the spirit life and 
the spirit body. These pictures were 
nothing very striking as regards the 
mere drawing which was about what 
might be expected from an intelligent 
child of twelve years old ; but the 
composition was marvelously good, and 
the subjects chosen most remarkable 
under the circumstances. All those I 
saw were connected either with the 



114 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

moment of death or with the ex- 
periences of life immediately after 
death. Some were adorned by curious 
and sometimes beautiful flowers and 
foliage, not quite like anything we see 
upon earth, but very reminiscent to me in 
later years of some of Mrs. Alaric Watt's 
exquisite spirit flower drawings ; al- 
though in her case the execution was 
faultless and naturally far superior to 
that of the little girl. But the child's 
picture which remains most vividly in 
my memory is one where you see in the 
right-hand corner a bed, and on it a 
corpse of a man who has evidently just 
died. His weeping relations stand round 
the bed and innumerable fine lines are 
drawn out from the eyes, ears, nostrils 
and mouth of the corpse and rising in a 
misty cloud from the latter form into a 
diaphanous second body over the dead man's 
head, this second body being attached to 
the corpse on the bed below by a very 
fine cord or string passing from one to 
the other. In the left-hand corner of the 
picture is given in a cramped, childish 
hand its explanation. 



CLAIRVOYANCE 115 

The fine mist, drawn out from the 
physical body and gathering into the 
form of a second likeness of the man 
overhead, is the " spirit body " and it is 
attached to the physical body by an 
" umbilical cord." Needless to point out 
that the latter piece of information could 
scarcely be normal to a child of twelve 
years old. The writing went on to ex- 
plain that this cord was sometimes in- 
tact for several days after physical death 
had taken place, and in such case the 
spirit man could not get away from his 
body and often attended his own funeral ; 
more specially when the latter took place 
shortly after the decease. Doubtless 
some occult knowledge of this kind led 
to the old Egyptian practice of leaving 
provisions in the tombs of their dead — a 
sort of materialized recognition of this 
close tie between the natural and the 
spiritual bodies of the deceased. 

" Psychics " are those persons who ap- 
pear to be born with some special and ab- 
normal capacity for functioning through 
the spirit body, to some slight and often 
intermittent extent. Probably all of us 



116 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

have had some small indication of this 
capacity at some special crisis in life. We 
may see something abnormal for the first 
and only time in our lives ; or some 
warning may be conveyed to us, through 
a mysterious voice which possibly we 
never hear again, or under some strain of 
emotion, joyous or sorrowful, we may be 
conscious for the moment of being outside 
of ourselves as it were ; conscious of some 
avenue of knowledge hitherto closed to 
us ; of some strength or courage which 
comes to us at a critical moment, appar- 
ently " from the blue." What mother is 
not capable of some heroic deed when the 
life of husband or child is at stake ? For 
the moment she is " out of herself" very 
literally ; outside of her own physical 
limitations, and whether it be a case of 
abnormal strength or abnormal perception 
which averts the danger, it is probably a 
fact that for those moments she has left 
the limitations of the physical body — her 
prison-house — and is functioning from 
the etheric or spirit body. 

For most of us, these moments are few 
and far between ; we are quickly put back 



CLAIRVOYANCE 117 

behind our bars and when any such ex- 
perience is over, even the memory of it is 
apt to pass away and the normal reasserts 
its iron sway. But some few — an ever- 
increasing number — seem less heavily 
manacled by the physical senses. They 
can peep between the bars and even 
thrust their heads through now and then 
and have a few whiffs of the life-giving 
air outside. The bars of their cells seem 
somewhat wider apart than ours, but 
when they return to our stifling atmos* 
phere and begin to tell us something from 
their more extended vision, we are not 
always very grateful, nor even very polite. 
We are apt to say they must be roman- 
cing (if not something less civil ! ) and that 
probably they are suffering from hysteria 
or some such form of degeneracy. It 
does not seem to strike us that we, with 
our absurdly limited power of sight and 
sound, may be the degenerates, and that 
our " fanciful friends " may be slowly 
emerging from that state ! 

If clairvoyance be seeing through the 
eyes of the etheric or spirit body and 
clairaudience be hearing through its ears, 



118 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

then we have some reason to infer that 
telepathic impressions are in all proba- 
bility conveyed through the etheric or 
spirit body brain. 

It will be at once objected to this sug- 
gestion that Thought has always been a 
universal and not a special possession 
with the human race, so soon as ^//-con- 
sciousness is reached, and that thought is 
independent of space and also of time, so 
far as we know. Certainly the immense 
area of events sometimes realized by us 
in a dream, between the opening of a door 
and the entrance of the person who wakes 
us up, would seem to indicate the latter 
fact. 

Granted; but how do we know that 
thought is not and has not always been 
our one universal working link between 
the two spheres of existence to which the 
two bodies — the natural body and the 
spiritual body — belong? 

Thought lies beyond the five senses. 
We cannot see it, nor hear it, nor smell 
it, nor taste it, nor touch it. Yet thought 
has to work through the physical brain, 
as normal sight works through the phys- 



CLAIRVOYANCE 119 

ical eye. It is however less restricted than 
any other part of our earth consciousness. 
As that consciousness develops, so do our 
thoughts rise into the blue skies above us 
and pierce beyond them ; or descend into 
the lowest depths and try to wrest their 
secrets. From the earthly point of view, 
Thought is already unfettered and un- 
limited — our closest touch with the In- 
finite. For most of us thought is an un- 
disciplined, unconcentrated, unsystema- 
tized experience. None the less it tran- 
scends in scope and magnitude all other 
experiences. It comes into our conscious- 
ness through the highest point in our 
physical organization, the brain, working 
thence through the highest point in our 
etheric organization. That we should 
already be capable of functioning through 
the highest part of our etheric body and 
bringing it into physical manifestation 
{whether consciously or not) does not affect 
the question of functioning through other 
organs of the spirit body. We may be 
thankful that the general link between 
the spheres has been made at the highest 
and not at the lowest point ; that to all of 



120 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

us has been given the Freedom of the 
City of Thought, whilst the " higher 
physical " organs of sight and hearing 
are the possession alone of the privileged 
few. 

To return to the more practical side of 
telepathy. I have often wondered why it 
is so much more respectable to be tele- 
pathic than to be clairvoyant or clairaudi- 
ent ? There is no doubt about the fact. 
Not one of us is ashamed of pleading 
guilty to the soft impeachment of a 
" brain wave/' whereas the very words 
" clairvoyance " and " clairaudience " con- 
jure up visions of Bond Street waiting- 
rooms or even the lower depths of Lad- 
broke Grove Road and a room full of 
credulous clients longing to be pleasantly 
deceived. I think the reason is obvious. 
Science has begun with telepathy and the 
reason for this is also obvious. Thought 
is a universal possession and in telepathy 
we are only touching upon methods for 
conveying thought in an orderly fashion ; 
whereas the sights and sounds experi- 
enced by " Sensitives " are not a universal 
possession, and even when veridical are 



CLAIEVOYANCE 121 

far less capable of immediate proof to the 
busy or superficial investigator. 

If you sit in your study in Edinburgh 
and try to impress your friend in London 
(who is experimenting with you) to go to 
a particular shop in Bond Street and buy 
himself a tie of a certain color, you can 
hear well within twenty-four hours 
whether your telepathic experiment has 
been a success or not. But if you are 
clairvoyant and see a friend stepping into 
an omnibus or a hansom cab at a par- 
ticular hour, and you write and ask him 
about it, it is ten to one that he cannot 
accurately answer your question, which is 
connected with a general and spontane- 
ous action, not with a definite and special 
one, as in the former case. Or if you 
have a vision of a coffin and see a friend 
or an acquaintance inside of it, it may be 
weeks and months before the vision is 
verified. Perhaps you have not cared to 
mention such a gruesome experience, fear- 
ing it might get round to the person you 
have seen, and so a good bit of evidence 
is lost. 

For these and many other reasons 



122 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

which will easily suggest themselves, 
telepathy is at present the point of least 
resistance from the scientific outlook and 
therefore quite rightly the first object for 
the researches of scientists. In time we 
may now hope that they will pass on 
to other well-attested manifestations of 
the etheric body and that these in turn 
will receive scientific recognition and be- 
come respectable and legitimate subjects 
for conversation and research. I am 
afraid we must admit that both clairvoy- 
ance and clairaudience have sometimes 
been in " very bad company," as Mr. 
Frederic Myers used to say about 
" spirits," when reproached for evading 
the expression. 

An honest and intelligent clairvoyant 
will always tell you that the difficulty is 
not in seeing but in placing what is seen. 
I will illustrate my meaning by one or 
two personal experiences. Some years 
ago I went to see a Mrs. Chester in 
Drayton Gardens, who was both honest 
and intelligent and who drew my atten- 
tion to the difficulty I have mentioned. 
Curiously enough she gave me uncon- 



CLAIRVOYANCE 123 

sciously an illustration of it during that 
same visit. 

She described accurately a man and a 
woman, the latter having very beautiful 
hair both in color and quantity, and then 
told me that I should soon be made the con- 
fidante of their love-affairs and be deeply 
interested in them. "They are very 
much in love with each other and they 
are going to tell you all about it, yes, al- 
most immediately, and you will be in- 
tensely interested in it all." I could not 
place the statement at all and told her so. 
I knew no two people at the moment who 
were, or were likely to be, engaged to 
each other, corresponding with her very 
accurate description of features and color- 
ing ; nor did I know any two young peo- 
ple likely to confide their love-affairs to 
me just then, but Mrs. Chester persisted 
in what she saw and in the fact that I 
should hear about it almost immediately, 
certainly within a day or two. 

This was on a Friday. The very next 
day I went to see The Little Minister, 
which made a great and most charming 
impression upon me, and when Cyril 



124 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

Maude and Winifred Emery were enact- 
ing the two principal parts in their fas- 
cinating love scene, I recognized at once 
the personal descriptions given to me by 
Mrs. Chester and the extreme interest 
that I was to take in hearing their con- 
fidence — shared in this case by the whole 
theatre ! 

It sounds absurd when written down, 
but nothing is absurd which increases our 
knowledge or enlightens our ignorance. 

Most certainly Mrs. Chester must have 
been seeing the two actors mentioned, 
when describing them to me so accurately, 
and must have sensed the love scene be- 
tween them. I believe I had already 
made up my mind to go to this special 
theatre next day, but am not absolutely 
certain of this. I am absolutely certain 
that the idea was not present in my mind 
during my sitting, and that I did not 
make any reference to it. Here the facts 
were correct enough ; but the application 
of them was in error. 

I remember some years ago taking a 
niece of Archbishop Maclagan to a " Mon- 
day evening" in Southampton Row, 



CLAIKVOYANCE 125 

when Mr. John Burns gave such inter- 
esting and wise lectures on Phrenology 
and other subjects. 

This young lady sat next to a coach- 
man who combined clairvoyance with 
his driving business and they entered 
into conversation. I saw her hand him 
a small gold brooch but heard no more 
about it until we left the house. She 
then told me that he had given a most 
wonderful and accurate account not only 
of the giver of the brooch but also of his 
appearance and his character, which 
latter she said was by no means a very 
ordinary one. So far the man went by 
his true clairvoyant instinct or knowl- 
edge. But then unfortunately the 
" guesswork " began. As the lady was 
young and seemed very keen about the 
matter and anxious to hear all the par- 
ticulars possible with regard to the char- 
acter of the giver, the coachman natur- 
ally concluded he must be her Jlanc6 and 
unfortunately for his own clairvoyance 
reputation, he boldly stated this as a fact. 
This is just where clairvoyance is so apt 
to break down. Seeing so much, it must 



126 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

be an almost irresistible temptation to 
put the finishing touch which may be so 
telling — the coping-stone to the whole 
structure — but which we do not actually 
"see" in the picture presented to us. 
Yet clairvoyance can be extraordinarily 
accurate even in detail, as another story 
connected with Mrs. Chester and which 
came under my personal knowledge, will 
show. 

I went to see some friends in London 
a few years ago on my return from abroad 
and was at once hailed by the following 
incident which had just happened to 
them. A friend of theirs (whom I did 
not know until later in the afternoon) 
had lost a very large and valuable ruby 
set in a ring with small diamonds sur- 
rounding it. The stone had been given 
to this lady's grandfather by an Indian 
Rajah in the old Company's days, and 
was quite an heirloom for its historical 
associations in addition to its great in- 
trinsic value. 

The lady lived near Elm Park Gardens 
and on a very wet and muddy morning 
had been into several shops in that neigh- 



CLAIRVOYANCE 127 

borhood on her way from morning serv- 
ice close by. She had taken off her gloves 
in church and had not replaced them, 
was holding up her skirts out of the rain 
and mud and carrying several small 
parcels as she stood at her own front 
door and rang the bell. As a matter of 
fact she and her mother were expecting 
a lady and gentleman to lunch, who 
will figure in the story later on. As 
she stood waiting at the door, muffled up 
in a waterproof and holding her dripping 
umbrella, she chanced to glance at her 
bare hand and to her horror saw that the 
enormous ruby had disappeared, leaving 
the diamond setting intact. She turned 
back instantly, after depositing her 
parcels with the maid, and retraced her 
steps to the two or three shops visited, 
but all in vain ! She was forced to re- 
turn home and to conceal her trouble 
and annoyance as best she could whilst 
entertaining her guests. The moment 
she could leave the house, she went round 
to my friends in Evelyn Gardens and told 
them of her sad loss and asked if one of 
them would consult a clairvoyant for her. 



128 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

Her reason for not going herself to a 
clairvoyant was that she considered all 
such things wrong and therefore evi- 
dently preferred that her friends should 
take any moral risks that might attach 
to the possible recovery of her property. 
I think I had given Mrs. Chester's address 
to these ladies. Anyway they promised 
Miss X. (the owner of the ruby) that 
they would see what could be done in 
the matter. The stone was lost on a 
Thursday morning and on Friday they 
visited Mrs. Chester, having settled be- 
forehand to bargain with her that she 
should not be paid unless the lost article 
was recovered through her. She agreed 
to these terms and took up the crystal. 
Nothing had been said about a ring, 
brooch, or any other piece of jewelry 
but merely the statement made that they 
came to consult her about some " lost 
property." 

" You need not tell me anything 
more," she said quickly ; " I can see what 
it is in the crystal. It is a stone — a stone 
out of a ring' 1 Then she turned round 
and said, " But you have not lost it, either 



CLAIRVOYANCE 129 

of you ; the person who lost it ought to 
have come about it herself. It is giving 
me a very poor chance/' However this 
may have been, she seemed very quickly 
to get into Miss X.'s atmosphere and be- 
gan describing a peculiar dining-room 
table with carved corners ; and this my 
friend at once recognized as the dining- 
room table belonging to Mrs. X. Then 
she said, " The stone has been picked up 
by an honest man but he does not know 
what to do with it. He is a workman 
and has a white cap and working clothes. 
At first he thought it was a bit of red 
glass because it is so large, but he has 
taken it home. I see his home and a 
narrow mantel-shelf there — he has put 
the stone in a little pill-box and placed it 
on the mantel-shelf. You must advertise 
the stone at once, so that he may read 
the advertisements and bring it back. 
Put the advertisements in shop-windows 
near to the place where it was lost — no 
use advertising in papers — he won't get a 
chance of reading." 

Then Mrs. Chester went on to describe 
a scene and people acting in the scene, all 



130 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

utterly unknown to my friends. " I see 
a church and there is a wedding going 
on. It is either a widower or a widow 
who is being married, because there is a 
little child at the wedding and she be- 
longs to either the bride or the bride- 
groom. Now they are coming down the 
church and I can see their faces as they 
pass." 

She then described both of the princi- 
pal actors in the scene, neither of whom 
could be recognized by my friends. 
This, they confessed, disappointed them 
greatly, for on first hearing of the church 
and the wedding they were trying to 
work in some possible romance for their 
elderly friend who might some day meet 
a suitable widower ! 

As a curious fact, I may here mention 
that the wedding took place on the fol- 
lowing Tuesday, but Miss X. was only 
present as a spectator. It is still more in- 
teresting to note that the bride and bride- 
groom were the two people who had 
lunched with Mrs. X. on the day the 
stone was lost and that the lady was a 
widow, with one little girl who was pres- 



CLAIRVOYANCE 131 

ent at the ceremony. Either the lady or 
gentleman was a relation of Miss X. and 
the scene of their wedding must have 
been read from her psychic atmosphere 
four days before it took place. 

Finally Mrs. Chester returned to the 
question of the stone and made the very 
definite statement that it would be found 
and probably within five days. " I can 
see a big 5," she said, " so if it is not five 
days, it must indicate weeks or months 
but five days is more probable because I 
see so distinctly the scene when it is re- 
turned. There is an old lady sitting at 
that table I described and she has white 
hair and a white cap. There is a maid- 
servant in the room and also a working 
man. He has brought the pill-box I saw 
on the mantel-shelf. There is a lot of 
white wool and the stone in the middle. 
Some one has brought down the ring and 
he won't give up the stone until he sees if 
it fits or not." 

This was all that passed and my 
friends went away, promising to have 
the advertisement printed at once and 
put in the shop-windows according to 



132 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

Mrs. Chester's instructions ; also to 
return and give her the fee, should the 
stone be found within any reasonable 
time. On the following Tuesday morn- 
ing, before lunch time Miss X. returned 
home to find the dining-room door open 
and the exact scene going on which had 
been so accurately foretold by Mrs. 
Chester. 

Her mother, the working man, and 
the maid were all present, the latter hav- 
ing been sent up-stairs to fetch the empty 
ring which Miss X. had taken off her 
finger five days before. 

The man had picked up the stone just 
outside the church door in all the rain 
and mud, and supposed at first that it 
was a valueless bit of glass. He took it 
home and washed it and then put it in 
the pill-box as described, being struck by 
the beautiful coloring and determined to 
look out for any advertisements in the 
neighborhood of the church where he 
had found the stone. He had declined 
to give it up without seeing the ring for 
himself, and this bit of identification was 
actually going on when Miss X. walked 



CLAIRVOYANCE 133 

through the open door of the dining- 
room ! The man received his five 
pounds with great delight and the X.'s 
were equally pleased to get back their 
precious heirloom. One last coincidence, 
to make the story quite complete. 

Just as my friend had finished giving 
me all these details, the butler threw 
open the door and announced — Miss X. ! 
So I made her acquaintance on the spot, 
and she not only showed me the magic 
ring, but allowed me to put it on my 
finger ; endorsing every word of the 
story to which I had just been listening. 



CHAPTER VII 

CLAIRAUDIENCE 

As a clairvoyant person sees through 
the eye of the spirit or etheric body, of 
which our physical body is the envelope, 
so a clairaudient person hears through the 
inner ears or to put it more simply, the 
ear of the etheric body. We must bear 
in mind that we possess already these 
two bodies, the etheric and the physical 
bodies, the one encasing the other as the 
atmospheric air represents the lower 
physical manifestation of the " higher 
physical " etheric element, which it en- 
closes. 

It is a wonderful and beautiful fact in 
science that Nature is coming into her 
etheric kingdom just in time to keep 
pace with our own discoveries as regards 
the existence and the higher powers of 
our etheric bodies, hitherto called our 
spirit bodies. In wireless telegraphy we 
134 



CLAIRAUDIENCE 135 

have the material symbol and equivalent 
of our mental telegraphy which we have 
christened telepathy. In the marvelous 
properties of the newly-discovered and 
magical radium have we not the material 
symbol and equivalent of those spiritual 
influences which surround and emanate 
from all beautiful natures, affecting so 
subtly and yet surely, all who come 
within their radius ? 

Miss Lilian Whiting has very truly 
said, " Just as rapidly as the power of 
the spiritual man develops and demands 
methods of life pertaining to the spiritual 
world, these methods are evolved. It is 
a part of the divine inheritance of 
humanity." And further on in the 
same article she remarks, " There is a 
natural body and there is a spiritual 
body." Here is the basis of the true 
explanation. This spiritual body is the 
real, the permanent being. We are all, 
here and now, spiritual beings in the 
spiritual body and in touch with 
spiritual forces. But this spiritual body 
is temporarily clothed with a physical 
covering, in order that the individual 



136 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

may temporarily enter into relations 
with the physical world. " 

Miss Whiting's general meaning is 
quite clear, but as a matter of strict ac- 
curacy I should rather take exception to 
the sentence, " This spiritual body is the 
real, the permanent being." 

I have myself appropriated the name 
" spirit body " because St. Paul speaks of 
it in that way. As a matter of fact we 
are naturally inclined to use the word 
" spirit " about everything which tran- 
scends the material as we at present com- 
prehend matter. Therefore we speak of 
the spirit body in somewhat vague but 
convenient fashion and most people know 
exactly what we mean. In the same way 
we speak of sunrise and nobody is really 
misled by an inaccurate and essentially 
untrue expression. In like manner we 
talk sometimes of having " seen a spirit " 
and certainly read about other people 
who have done so. As a matter of fact 
nobody has ever seen a spirit, nor can we 
have the least idea what is really compre- 
hended in such a term. We " see spirits " 
in our flesh and blood friends quite as 



CLAIRAUDIENCE 137 

truly and quite as dimly as in those who 
have put off the outer physical covering. 
But nobody is really deceived by the in- 
accurate expression. Every one under- 
stands that what we mean is that we have 
seen, or suppose we have seen, an individ- 
ual who is clothed no longer by the phys- 
ical but by the etheric body. Yet the 
etheric body is still matter, in a greater 
state of tenuity. Therefore we are not 
strictly justified in saying, " This spiritual 
body is the real — the permanent being" be- 
cause we do not know how many still 
more attenuated forms of manifestation 
may exist beyond the etheric, and in due 
time form envelopes for the ever-advanc- 
ing human entity. 

Form changes infinitely, whilst essence 
remains stable — the same yesterday, to- 
day, and forever. But of that essence 
no one of us can form any adequate 
idea ; we can know of it only within 
the limits of our present powers of ap- 
prehension. 

To return to more practical matters. 
If you live for some weeks or months 
with a really sensible, level-headed 



138 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

woman who happens to be clairaudient, it 
is curious how quickly one comes to look 
upon her power in this direction as quite 
normal and not in the least miraculous. 
It is only like extending the circle of 
your visiting acquaintances by going to 
live in London after vegetating in the 
country. I have had this experience 
with the lady who figures in Seen and Un- 
seen as Mrs. Finch. She is one of the 
most capable women in mundane matters 
whom I know. There is nothing of the 
dreamy artistic, imaginative temperament 
about her. Music is the channel through 
which her artistic sympathies flow ; but 
even here she is essentially modern, a thor- 
oughgoing Wagnerite. When I add that 
she is a devoted wife and an admirable 
stepmother to two young girls, who need 
and receive all her care and attention and 
most of her time, I shall have said enough 
to show that any psychic power she pos- 
sesses exists and persists in anything but 
favorable soil for dreamy abstractions of 
thought and feeling. Attending to the 
education of two growing girls and trot- 
ting about after them from morning to 



CLAIRAUDIENCE 139 

night, leaves small space for encourag- 
ing the imagination ! 

Yet Mrs. Finch is one of the most 
normal clairaudients I know. She is al- 
ways in touch with the next sphere in 
this way and has experience both grave 
and gay. 

Being an essentially good, kind-hearted 
woman, she does a great deal of philan- 
thropic work on the psychic as well as on 
the physical plane, and personally I have 
had occasion to be grateful to her more 
than once for help in time of need, which 
has come through her clairaudient faculty. 
It is as natural for her to speak to those in 
the next sphere as to any other embodied 
spirit ; and instead of accepting their com- 
munications as final and omniscient wis- 
dom, she sifts them as carefully as she 
would criticise the opinions of earth 
friends and uses her own judgment in the 
one case as in the other. Sometimes in 
the middle of a most practical conversa- 
tion, she will look up for a moment with 
a smile and answer a remark which I have 
not heard. This sounds uncanny but no 
one living with her could think it so after 



140 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

the first experience ; for there is not the 
smallest trace of hysteria or any want of 
balance about her. Most people would 
probably place her as a very kind and 
pleasant but rather prosaic person on the 
surface. This may be a rather exceptional 
case but I quote it because it is one with 
which I am very familiar and because it 
shows how natural and non-sensational 
intercourse between us and the next 
sphere of existence can be, and surely 
ought to be if it take place at all ? It is 
when looked upon as something extraor- 
dinary and miraculous that weak-minded 
people become hypnotized by it to the 
neglect of all their earthly duties and 
avocations ; and then you are told how 
poor Mrs. Browne's household has been 
put completely out of joint and the whole 
family demoralized since " Mrs. Browne's 
took to spiritualism." 

Mrs. Finch is most particular in not 
allowing vague messages from unknown 
sources, any more than she would allow 
a crowd of strangers to intrude upon her 
time and attention without proper intro- 
duction and observance of the ordinarv 



CLAIRAUDIENCE 141 

courtesies of life. In this way she re- 
mains mistress of the situation, is always 
ready to help those who really need help, 
but will not permit idle vagrants and 
gossips to make " charpie " of her life 
from the other side, any more than her 
incarnate friends would dare to do. That 
seems to me an ideal exercise of these 
etheric faculties and I think such cases 
should be studied as an object lesson. 
What a gulf lies between this and the 
disorderly incursions made through the 
etheric faculties of those poor people 
whose inner ears have been opened, with- 
out knowledge to guide them in dealing 
with evil or undesirable psychic acquaint- 
ances. This happens, to my certain 
knowledge, quite as frequently in the 
cases of those persons who are entirely 
ignorant of psychic matters, as in the case 
of so-called spiritualists. As a matter of 
fact the latter, knowing more, are better 
able to protect themselves. In any case 
they can apply more readily for assistance 
in the direction whence it can be given 
to them ; whereas there is nothing for it 
for the unfortunate man or woman who 



142 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

has become clairaudient through some 
physical catastrophe or weakened vitality, 
but to consult a doctor and probably end 
in a lunatic asylum. The doctor, from 
his own limited experience, naturally 
pronounces the "voices " and " sentences " 
complained of by the patient, to be illu- 
sion and self-suggestion, arising from 
brain trouble ; and quite honestly pre- 
scribes treatment which probably ends 
in making the unfortunate person ac- 
tually insane as well as unfortunately 
clairaudient. I can speak with some 
authority here for I have known such 
cases in my own immediate circle of 
friends and acquaintances. I knew of 
two such cases happening almost simul- 
taneously — both were men and men en- 
tirely ignorant of anything connected with 
our present subject. Both were active men 
and hard riders, who had led exception- 
ally healthy outdoor lives. They were 
also old friends and companions in by- 
gone days. 

By a curious coincidence both these 
cases came under my immediate observa- 
tion. The one man was confined in an 



CLAIEAUDIENCE 143 

asylum. The greatest efforts were made 
to provide the same treatment for the 
second man. These efforts mercifully 
failed, although endorsed by medical 
advice. 

The results have been as follows : — 
The first man, after eighteen months of 
misery and quite ineffectual " treatment," 
was at length with great difficulty re- 
moved from the asylum through the 
unceasing efforts of his devoted mother, 
and spent the rest of his few remaining 
years in his own home but under super- 
vision, rendered necessary by the circum- 
stances of the case. 

When an educated gentleman, ac- 
customed to rule rather than to be 
ruled, is put under the irksome restraint 
of uneducated officials, who are no more 
perfect than any other human beings, 
what wonder that the latter should often 
grow weary and impatient, a little elated 
by having in their power and at their 
command a man so much their superior 
in rank and capacity? It is all so 
natural and so inevitable. In this par- 
ticular case, when the patient gave 



144 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

trouble or was slow in dressing, etc., his 
mother's and his wife's letters (his one 
consolation) were taken from him by 
these uneducated and ignorant attendants 
and he was told he should not have them 
again until he had obeyed orders. 

All very natural, when tactless and 
ignorant attendants are in question. 
They were probably quite unintention- 
ally cruel ; but what treatment could be 
worse for a man accustomed to command 
other men and for a brain already in a 
state of irritation and discomfort ? 

Meanwhile the second man, whose wife 
was an exceptionally brave woman, had 
been kept out of an asylum, in spite of 
doctors and magistrates combined. A 
surgical blunder was found to have been 
the immediate cause of the disaster in 
this case. Low vitality and great phys- 
ical irritation and suffering had resulted 
in the unfortunate and unprepared func- 
tioning of the etheric body and the " spirit 
ears " had been prematurely opened, with 
the result, apparently, that a crowd of 
undeveloped and undesirable psychic 
visitors had surged through, tormenting 



CLAIRAUDIENCE 145 

and worrying the poor man, who had no 
knowledge of the possibility of such a 
phenomenon and therefore no knowledge 
of how to treat it. The doctors of course 
assured his wife that he was suffering from 
mental delusions. What else could they 
say ? 

I went down to stay with them during 
the worst of the experience. I shall 
never forget his evident relief when I 
accepted his stories of the " voices " as a 
matter of fact and not of fancy, and gave 
him a few simple suggestions for dealing 
with his unwelcome visitors. He said to 
me one day, " Nobody has ridiculed your 
ideas and laughed them to scorn more 
than I have done ; but I know now that 
they are true." 

Well, I am thankful to say that this 
gentleman is still alive and able to enjoy 
the care and companionship of his wife 
and the comfort of his home. He will 
never be so strong physically as before, 
but his shrewd intelligence is restored to 
him and he has developed a love of read- 
ing, which in great measure makes up to 
him for the loss of his more active life. 



146 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

These two cases show how disastrous may 
be the results of an abnormal and un- 
timely development of the etheric, as dis- 
tinguished from the atmospheric hearing. 
St. Paul knew what he was talking 
about when he spoke of the " principali- 
ties and powers and rulers of darkness and 
spiritual wickedness in high places." 
Until we are normally and carefully pre- 
pared for the higher perceptive and au- 
ditory powers belonging to our etheric 
bodies, let us pray that we may be kept 
from any immature and ill-advised open- 
ing out of these etheric avenues of the 
spirit ! Those who have been natural 
clairaudients all their lives may reason- 
ably suppose that the development is in 
their cases timely and normal. But where 
it has been brought about suddenly and 
through some untoward physical catas- 
trophe or condition, it is above all things 
essential that such cases should be dealt 
with by competent and experienced 
psychic healers before being relegated to 
the hands of orthodox medical doctors, 
however skilful and conscientious they 
may be. 



CLAIRAUDIENCE 147 

Very few doctors have any developed 
knowledge of mental disease and mental 
treatment, except from a purely physical 
standpoint, and the few who may have 
this would not dare to treat a patient 
from any but duly prescribed and regis- 
tered standards. It would be a sin against 
professional etiquette. Therefore in 999 
cases out of 1,000, such a mental sufferer 
as we have described, has only the asylum 
before him. We hear much of the ad- 
mirable treatment in asylums of mental 
trouble. Far be it from me to assert that 
this is not sometimes efficacious, but such 
cases are seldom permanent, for the suf- 
ficient reason that the usual root of the 
disease has never been treated nor even 
discovered. If we do not know what is 
the matter with a person, we may by 
chance prescribe the right remedy for 
him ; but it must be a " hit or miss " sort 
of business at best. 

" When in doubt about sudden illness 
give a dose of castor-oil " used to be the 
old nursery dictum, and this still obtains 
in the remote sheep stations of Australia 
and New Zealand. A very excellent piece 



148 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

of advice for the usual physical ills, but 
unfortunately we have no such universal 
nostrum for mental troubles. The great- 
est drawback, as regards asylums, lies in 
the fact that their very existence is in di- 
rect opposition to all intelligent laws of 
mental treatment. I concede willingly 
that it is difficult to suggest what should 
replace them under present conditions of 
humanity. Yet we must also acknowl- 
edge that if any one requires, more 
urgently than another, to live amongst 
sane people and sane influences, it is the 
man or woman whose mental functions 
have become disordered and unhinged. 
We must also be aware from daily experi- 
ence of the enormous effect upon us all 
of our own mental and spiritual surround- 
ings. 

Judged from either standpoint, our 
present-day asylums are certainly not 
ideal institutions. 



CHAPTER VIII 

REINCARNATION 

Some years ago, a man who had come 
into communication with his deceased 
father through my help, begged me to 
ask the latter " if there were any truth 
in reincarnation." 

The answer was practically as follows : 
"I do wish that George would not ask 
me these very definite questions about 
that which, although a truth on a cer- 
tain plane of existence, is not a vital nor 
essential truth/' He went on to explain 
that he meant by this that reincarnation 
might be advisable and even necessary at 
certain stages in the soul's progression, 
or might be the outcome of the soul's 
affinities and predilections ; or again the 
result of choice in the case of some noble 
soul voluntarily undertaking missionary 
work in this elementary and sorrowful 
world. All this he inferred was possible 
and probable but he declined to make 
149 



150 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

any definite and sweeping assertions as 
to reincarnation per se, as universally 
necessary for all souls at all stages of their 
education. 

This shows that there is at least as 
much diversity of opinion on the other 
side with regard to this vexed question 
as on this side. We have the followers 
of Madame Blavatsky and Mrs. Besant 
and Mr. Sinnett, dogmatically asserting 
the absolute reign of this law, independ- 
ent of race or individual. They are pre- 
pared to tell us in round numbers how 
many reincarnations are necessary for us 
and what intervals of time take place 
between them. On the other hand, we 
have had Dr. Wyld and a very large sec- 
tion of " spiritualists " equally fierce in 
their denunciation of the law which, 
with them, becomes a theory. They sup- 
port their views by assuring us that all 
the communications they receive are from 
spirits who affirm most positively that 
there is not a grain of truth in the idea 
of reincarnation ; that if earth's lessons 
have not been fully learned here, then 
something may be permitted occasionally 



REINCARNATION 151 

in the way of " looking over the other 
boy's lesson book," by overshadowing 
him as it were ; but that it is not pos- 
sible to enter the schoolroom once more 
and sit down again on the form. I can 
recall that Dr. Wyld had an elaborate 
numerical argument against any possi- 
bility of the truth of reincarnation and 
that it never convinced me in the smallest 
degree ; but as I have forgotten the exact 
details, I will not risk misrepresenting 
him. Now I do not think that we have 
any proof in this, that communications 
purporting to come from beyond the Veil 
are merely subjective. It is more probable, 
I think, that these divergences of opinion 
truly represent in many cases divergence 
of opinion amongst the unseen friends, 
and that we naturally attract toward our- 
selves those who are most in sympathy with us 
in our conceptions. The objection will at 
once be made, " But surely they must know 
whether reincarnation is a truth or an 
error?" But why must they know? It 
remains an open question for many of us 
upon earth; and yet if there be lower 
spheres than the one we now know, and 



152 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

any entity from such a sphere could com- 
municate with us, he would receive a very 
definite affirmative from a great many 
thousands of this world's inhabitants. 
Yet he would not be receiving the con- 
ceifisus of opinion from this planet. It is 
a question that cannot certainly be abso- 
lutely settled upon this earth and the ex- 
treme divergence of opinion, as shown in 
automatic writing, suggests that it will be 
equally difficult to come to any unques- 
tionable conclusions, even in the next 
sphere. 

I do not look upon our personal 
" glimpses of reincarnation " as of much 
evidential value, although they are cer- 
tainly curious at times and not always 
easy to account for. Of course I am not 
here referring to the mere general im- 
pression that we have shared a few popu- 
lar historical characters amongst us, nor 
even to the fact that our personal im- 
pression may have been strengthened by 
the independent corroboration of half a 
dozen mediums, to whom we may not 
have breathed a word of our own pleas- 
ant suspicion. Once get any idea of that 



REINCARNATION 153 

kind firmly imbedded in your own mind 
and the ordinary clairvoyant will read it 
there, as easily as any other fact in your 
life. You may even have made a thought 
image in your astral atmosphere by con- 
stant brooding over the idea. No, the 
only sort of " coincidence " which is 
worth a moment's consideration in this 
respect is one which I can best illustrate 
by a small and apparently trivial occur- 
rence in my own life. 

I must begin by confessing that I have 
for many years had a vague, floating im- 
pression, that a closer tie than usual 
binds me to an ancestor of my own — -to 
be quite honest, I have sometimes 
thought that I might be carrying on his 
life at the present moment. I have ab- 
solutely no ground for such an assump- 
tion except an extraordinary feeling of 
affinity with a man who died many years 
before my birth and of whom (through 
force of circumstances) nobody has ever 
spoken to me. So far the matter is very 
plain sailing — simply a case of imagina- 
tion, strengthening as years have passed 
and fully accounting for a curious coin- 



154 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

cidence in an experience I had once with 
a clairvoyant, whom I visited for the 
first time, when I was quite unknown in 
English psychic circles. Some letters 
written by this ancestor when a young 
and dashing Life Guardsman, more than 
a hundred years ago, had been unearthed 
in our solicitor's office and I had been al- 
lowed a sight of them. The morning 
they arrived I was visiting this clairvoy- 
ant and thought I would take one of the 
old-fashioned large squares of discolored 
ancient letter paper and see what came of 
it through psychometry. I did not in- 
tend that the woman should read the 
letter or even glance at the writing ; but 
simply hold it in her hand and give me 
her impression. Naturally I expected 
that these would at once and obviously, 
refer to the age of the letter and to the 
opening years of the nineteenth century. 
Nothing of the kind occurred. The 
character of the writer was the only fact 
demonstrated or apparently observed by 
the psychometrist, who evidently realized 
that the writer was not alive but made 
no special point of this fact until she said 



REINCARNATION 155 

at the end of her character reading, 
" This was a crowning incarnation, / 
think." 

I noted the tentative last words, for 
hitherto she had spoken with great deci- 
sion of the contraditions in character and 
the special spiritual difficulties of the man 
she was describing. I was not in a posi- 
tion either to affirm or deny the truth of 
what she said, for although nearly related 
to me, there had never been any one in 
my life to tell me about his character or 
spiritual views and surroundings. I had 
written a few lines myself and signed 
them and had brought them with me, 
wondering whether the clairvoyant, 
when touching them, might sense any 
relationship between me and the writer 
of the letter she held. So I took the 
latter away from her and substituting my 
own modern note-paper, with the writing 
only upon the inner sheet, I placed her 
hand upon this, sitting opposite to her 
all the time and said, " Here is quite a 
different person ; I wonder what you will 
say about this character ? " 

The moment her fingers touched the 



156 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

writing on the inner side of the note-sheet^ 
she looked startled and said, " I have 
made a mistake, they tell me. I must 
ask for information about this — there is 
something wrong. I was speaking those 
last words from my own impressions ; 
they tell me I was mistaken in what I 
said at the last." She closed her eyes 
and waited for a few moments in perfect 
stillness, still grasping the note-paper. 
Then she opened them again and said at 
once very quickly and impressively — 

" I was mistaken in saying about the 
other spirit that it was a crowning incarna- 
tion. They tell me that spirit is incar- 
nated again here in the writer of this 
note, and that this is a far more favorable 
incarnation/' 

" Far less favorable," I said, " so far as 
money and position are concerned." 

" Bah ! what do we think or care about 
that?" she answered, evidently under 
some control ; " it is far more favorable for 
spiritual development — that is the only 
thing that really matters." She had al- 
ready spoken in connection with the first 
letter, of the writer being greatly baulked 



REINCARNATION 157 

and hindered in his spiritual progress 
and possessing far more spiritual intui- 
tion than his surroundings gave him any 
chance to develop. 

Now it will be naturally and quite rea- 
sonably suggested that this clairvoyant 
(Mrs. Howarth) read my own impression 
and was reproducing it in a slightly 
dramatic form. Granted — but I have 
something further to tell, which happened 
several years later and does not admit of 
the same interpretation, although I can 
myself easily suggest an alternative one, 
which, however, I do not personally be- 
lieve to be the true one. 

I had made the acquaintance in London 
of Mr. and Mrs. Poulteney Bigelow, he 
being a literary man and the son of the 
well-known American Minister, Mr. John 
Bigelow. When I was leaving town in 
July and Mrs. Poulteney Bigelow heard 
that I was going to stay with a favorite 
cousin in Worcestershire, she made me 
promise that we would come over and 
spend a long day with her at Broadway. 
Her husband had undertaken some 
literary work for Harper Brothers which 



158 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

would entail three months on the Danube 
and Mr. Alfred Parsons was going with 
him to illustrate the letter-press. Mean- 
while Mrs. Bigelow was to spend the 
summer at Broadway with her daughters, 
then quite young children. 

Nowadays every one knows Broadway, 
but fifteen years ago it was less famous 
and I am ashamed to confess that I had 
never heard of the place, in spite of know- 
ing Worcestershire from childhood. I 
had a dim impression at the time that it 
must be some American discovery in the 
county, and hence the name ! I was 
quite surprised to find that my cousin 
knew there was such a place, although 
she had never been there. Anyway she 
told me it was very unget-at-able from 
our side of Worcester, but that if I wished 
to go very much, of course we could 
manage it. It was a long expedition, 
even with the kind loan of a private car- 
riage for the last six miles or more. The 
owner of the carriage (with whom we had 
lunched) dropped us at one end of the 
green and went on to pay a visit in the 
place, so we made our way alone to Mrs. 



REINCARNATION 159 

Bigelow's house, which was situated in 
another part of the unknown village. I 
had had no special impression about 
Broadway, apart from the wish to see 
Mrs. Bigelow, and it was not until the 
carriage had left us behind that a curi- 
ously strong sense of familiarity with the 
village set in. The quaint old green and 
the pretty Tudor houses charmed us both 
but suggested no special associations to 
my cousin, nor, at first, to me. But as 
we wandered on, not at all sure of our 
bearings and turning corners here and 
there in our search for the right house, it 
seemed to me as though I knew the place 
just as well as if I had been born there 
and had come back to revisit the scenes 
of my childhood. Several times before 
rounding a corner I said quite naturally, 
11 Oh, I know what there is here. It is 
only some farm buildings or an old barn 
(as the case might be). It is no use go- 
ing on here. Let us turn back." But my 
cousin said very sensibly, " Nonsense, 
Emmie !— how can you know ? Perhaps 
this is the very house we want." It was 
only when three or four times my remarks 



160 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

had proved true that either she or I 
recognized there was anything odd about 
them. It all seemed so natural to me 
and so fanciful to her, even when she 
was forced to admit that it was " rather 
queer." There was not a shadow of doubt 
that I had never been in the place before, 
nor even heard of it, and she knew it no 
better than I did, except by name. 

Later when Mrs. Bigelow had taken us 
both to tea with Mrs. Millet (the wife of 
the American artist), some joking remark 
was made about my curious " guesses " 
and there the matter ended. 

Now I must mention that in my an- 
cestor's old-fashioned letters, written in 
his youth and some of them from Worces- 
ter where he had been sent with a sergeant 
as a recruiting-officer in those past days, 
there had been several mentions of Gen- 
eral Lygon who commanded the Second 
Life Guards at the time. I think he may 
have been Colonel Lygon then and he 
had doubtless taken a fancy to the hand- 
some young officer under his command, 
who was asked in consequence to balls 
and other festivities. " Just been staying 



REINCARNATION 161 

with my colonel for a few days " was a 
fairly constant remark in his letters ; 
but there was no mention of the special 
locality and as I knew this General Lygon 
had later become the first Lord Beau- 
champ, I naturally concluded that these 
visits were paid to Madresfield Court, the 
Beauchamp property in the neighborhood 
of Malvern. 

About a week after our Broadway expe- 
dition, my cousin and I were having tea 
with a cousin of hers, who lived near and 
who had known me from my childhood. 

" Well, Ellen ! what have you and 
your cousin been doing this last week ? — 
gadding about somewhere as usual, I sup- 
pose ! " was this gentleman's first remark 
to us. He led such a quiet, country 
squire life himself that the smallest 
variety was looked upon as " gadding 
about " in search of amusement. 

" No, we have been very quiet," she 
answered, smiling ; " we have not been 
anywhere lately except to Broadway. 
Fancy my cousin knowing Worcester- 
shire all these years and never having 
heard of Broadway ! " 



162 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

" Ah, well, it's rather out of the way 
from here ; how did you get there ? 
That is where the Beauchamps lived, you 
know," he added very casually. It 
flashed across me in a moment that this 
might be a clue to my sense of having 
known the place alread}'. 

" The Beauchamps ?" I said with some 
incredulity. " But their place is Madres- 
field Court, surely, not Broadway ? " 

" Oh, yes ; they have lived at Madres- 
field for the last fifty years or so, but 
Broadway was the old family place 
originally," he answered carelessly, and 
the conversation turned into other chan- 
nels. 

Now my alternative suggestion is the 
obvious one that a departed ancestor 
could easily impress upon any descend- 
ant with whom he was in special sym- 
pathy, the details of his own knowledge 
of a village which he must have known 
well and where he must have spent many 
happy days in his youth. Perhaps it 
was so. On the other hand I am equally 
at liberty to suppose — if I wish — that my 
Broadway experiences were a slight but 



REINCARNATION 163 

personally suggestive indication of the 
truth of my theory. In the absence of 
any possibility of definite proof, one sup- 
position is as good as the other, because 
both transcend our normal experiences 
and are therefore equally repugnant to 
science — as it was ! 

It has always seemed to me that the 
question of reincarnation, although it can 
never be absolutely demonstrated here 
one way or the other, admits at least of 
common-sense analogy. If the whole aim 
and object of our present existence be the 
education of the individual and the de- 
velopment of character, with a dawning 
sense of cosmic unity then surely some 
such method as that offered by reincar- 
nation is far from unreasonable ? It has 
been constantly urged that reincarnation, 
if true, would still be demonstrated as 
useless, from the fact that its presumed 
object is baffled entirely by loss of mem- 
ory. This has never appeared to me a 
very sensible objection. If all human 
beings came into the world as similar in 
character as some cynics say all babies 
are in features, there might be some 



164 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

sense in the remark ; but we know this 
is not the case. After giving all due 
consideration to the question of environ- 
ment, we are still confronted by enormous 
differences in temperament and quite 
gigantic differences in capacity. Every- 
one realizes this in the case of genius and 
we are daily being forced to realize it in 
a grade below genius — the grade of ab- 
normal capacity. Whence comes this ex- 
traordinary facility for some special de- 
velopment of art? "Heredity," we say 
glibly and think that disposes of the 
matter. But very often it is not heredity 
in any immediate sense ; and if you are 
reduced to " throwing back " for several 
generations in search of your argument, 
you have watered down that argument 
very considerably. Again there may 
often be only one child in a large family 
with any special and abnormal talent in 
a particular direction. When heredity 
acts in such spasmodic and uncertain 
fashion, it does not cover the ground. 

I asked Oliver Wendell Holmes once 
whether he thought " children came into 
the world like blank sheets of paper ? " 



REINCARNATION 165 

"No, certainly not — scribbled all over," 
was his characteristic answer. The ques- 
tion is, where was the scribbling done f In 
this same earth school or in some other 
planetary academy ? It does not really 
seem so very vital ; and this brings us 
back to the opening sentences of this 
chapter. 

Is it so very vital a matter whether a 
man received his education at Eton or 
Harrow or Rugby ? Is not the question 
of what he learned more important than 
where he learned f Some men know more 
after leaving an obscure grammar-school 
than others after a long course of Eton, 
with every advantage that money can 
give. 

In earth education, it is generally con- 
sidered advisable to send a boy, for several 
terms at least, to the same school. Why 
should it be so unreasonable to imagine a 
similar method in the great universal 
scheme of education ? To say that we 
lose permanently, all that we forget tem- 
porarily, is absurd. Moreover when we 
see children coming into the world with 
varied gifts of so definite a nature ; varied 



166 DO THE DEAD DEPAET? 

characters of so definite a kind ; varied 
temperaments of so unmistakable a trend ; 
what right have we to affirm (allowing the 
possible truth of reincarnation) that the 
result of all former experiences has been lost t 
simply because we cannot remember whether 
we lived in Italy or Russia or England, nor 
the names of our fathers and mothers and 
friends and acquaintances. It is a con- 
fusion of ideas which has led to this ap- 
parently clinching argument against re- 
birth on this planet. We have confused 
circumstances with results, and have as- 
sumed that to lose the memory of the 
former, is to lose our heritage in the 
latter. 

I hold no brief for this or for any other 
unproved theory. I have only tried to 
set down as simply and fairly as I can, a 
few stray thoughts on the subject, illus- 
trating them from my own experiences 
of life ; but wishing to keep clear of any 
sort of dogmatism, with regard to either 
the thoughts or the illustrations. 



CHAPTER IX 

AUTOMATIC WRITING 

The word " automatic " has always ap- 
peared to me rather unfortunate and even 
misleading as applied to writing received 
from the other side of Life. 

To begin with, I believe there are as 
many differences in automatic writing as 
there are differences in brands of cham- 
pagne. I should personally make three 
broad distinctions, beginning with Intui- 
tional then Inspirational and finally 
Automatic writing ; dividing the last of 
the three into conscious and unconscious 
automatic messages. 

I will now go on to explain just what 
I mean by these four divisions — 

1. Intuitional writing. This, in my 
category, would be where pen or pencil 
is used, but where only the broad general 
idea is given from the Unseen, the whole 
detail being consciously added by using 
the medium's own brain capacity ; with 
167 



168 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

its individuality of wording and expres- 
sion. This kind of writing, although low- 
est in the scale from the automatic point of 
view, has its own very obvious advantages. 
It is more usually found in agents of some 
strength of character and power of intel- 
lect and such persons are the least likely 
to be victims of trifling or deceptive mes- 
sages. Their own strong personality 
drives off the mere tramp or vagrant 
from the spirit spheres. 

2. Inspirational writing. This is per- 
haps the most desirable of all, given a 
person of solid character and high aspira- 
tions, likely to attract inspiration of the 
noblest kind. We are too apt to forget 
that inspiration merely indicates a method 
and may be divine or infernal. In in- 
spirational writing not only the main 
idea would be given, but also as much of 
the clothing of the idea in earth language 
as is compatible with an absence of entire 
control over the personality of the agent. 

3. Automatic writing in the exact sense 
of the term. This would be where the 
personality of the scribe is completely 
overshadowed and in such cases the 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 169 

process is generally slower, more deficient 
and necessarily more exhausting. It is 
probably more exhausting for the com- 
municating intelligence also and perhaps 
not always more really accurate, except, 
as a matter of verbal expression. 

When I am receiving a short message 
of any great importance (for a friend, I 
mean) in this laborious way, I always feel 
rather like poor Smike in his frenzied 
efforts to repeat " Who knocks so loud? " 
after his kindly teacher, Nicholas Nickleby. 

4. This last class comprises automatic 
writing of the above description, but where 
the control is so absolute that the message 
does not pass through the conscious physical 
brain at all, but seems to take place as 
though some unseen hand guided the 
fingers of the recipient, without impress- 
ing the physical brain. There are natu- 
rally a host of " automatic writers " who 
should really be placed in Class II who 
place themselves in Class III. Class IV 
is a small one and few can place them- 
selves there without conscious, though 
perhaps not entirely intentional, im- 
posture. 



170 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

In all my life I have only known one 
truly and absolutely unconscious auto- 
matic writer. It will suggest itself at 
once to the intelligent reader that Classes 
III and IV carry far more possibilities of 
danger than Classes I and II, and this 
for obvious reasons. 

The more we remain masters of our 
own mental processes the better for us, 
unless we have exceptionally strong char- 
acters and feel that we can admit a tem- 
porary control for some really good and 
unselfish purpose. Otherwise we had 
much better leave the whole thing alone. 
For we may become slowly but surely 
hypnotized into conducting all our affairs 
on the lines laid down in our automatic 
script; our own powers of judgment and 
independent action will then atrophy by 
degrees and we shall become flabby autom- 
ata in real earnest, unable to act in the 
smallest detail of daily life without re- 
ceiving constant advice and assistance 
from the other side. As the higher and 
wiser spirits entirely decline to help peo- 
ple to their destruction in this sort of 
way, we can easily calculate the intrinsic 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 171 

worth of the advice received in such 
cases ! 

This is " Spiritualism gone mad " and 
has wrecked many a happy home. So 
also has orthodox theology of the old 
type, as the head of any lunatic asylum 
will assure you. 

And now to give a few personal details 
that may throw a little light upon the 
preceding statements. 

For fully five years after 1 had dis- 
covered the possibility of getting automatic 
writing, my spirit friends most urgently 
and insistently begged me not to exercise 
the gift " at present." " It will be dan- 
gerous for you. Leave it alone. Have 
nothing to do with it," and so forth. I 
did not care to persevere in the face of 
such decided and continual discour- 
agement, and am thankful that I 
took their counsel, which subsequent 
events proved to have been loving and 
wise. 

Later, when Mrs. Forbes told me she 
could communicate with her son (see 
Seen and Unseen) quite easily, I took it 
for granted that she meant in the way I 



172 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

had first suggested to her, i. e., by silent 
communion with him. 

When she told me one day by letter of 
a rather frightening and exceedingly dis- 
agreeable experience she had had, which 
almost induced her to give up everything 
connected with the subject, I found that 
she had been using pencil and paper at 
the very beginning of her experiences. 

Remembering the warnings and pro- 
hibitions I had received for so many 
years, it struck me that this might point 
to some of the dangers that had been 
indicated to me though not explained in 
detail. 

Asking for some information on the 
subject from my own guides, I received a 
very reasonable and sensible answer. 

They told me that Mrs. Forbes was 
probably not sufficiently developed at the 
time to make use of automatic writing 
without knowing how to protect herself 
from wandering influences. 

They said that one danger arose from 
the material means of communication. It 
is obviously easier to control a pen than 
to control a thought, one being on the 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 173 

material and the other on the higher 
mental plane ; that this was the reason I 
had not been allowed to make use of my 
own gift for so many years and that it 
would be well for me to warn tyros in 
this research against having recourse to 
means so liable to abuse, until they were 
sufficiently versed in mental science to 
be on guard against undesirable intruders. 
Even where the original communicator 
is above suspicion, he may be ousted and 
replaced from time to time by other en- 
tities ; especially when, as in the above 
case, the communicator was himself quite 
inexperienced and new to the work. 

With reference to my saying I had 
only known one absolutely unconscious 
automatic writer, I may add a few de- 
tails. 

There is nothing more difficult to 
prove, apart from a question of bona fides, 
than whether a claim of entire ignorance 
of facts can be accepted. We all know 
the old and excellent arguments connected 
with the somewhat mythical maid- 
servant who talked Greek or Hebrew in 
her delirium and was considered a 



174 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

miraculous person until some one dis- 
covered that she had once lived with an 
old clergyman (twenty or thirty years 
previously) who was wont to read 
Hebrew out loud in his study. The sug- 
gestion was that the sounds remained in 
the young girl's memory, although no 
sense attached itself to them and that 
these sounds were correctly reproduced 
as Hebrew words, when some physical 
disturbance had set the gramophone to 
work, as it were. 

As a matter of fact I believe there is 
no satisfactory evidence of the truth of 
this generally quoted story ; but it has 
been so often repeated to us to " explain " 
unaccountable " spirit" statements, that 
we are apt to think there must be some 
truth in it. Anyway, it illustrates 
very well a certain proposition. 

"If we are told something we don't 
know normally, then we may be sure we 
did really know it, though we did not 
know that we knew it ! " Granting this, 
we have only to assume that the medium 
picked it out of our submerged memory 
and reproduced it as a spirit communica- 



AUTOMATIC WKITING 175 

tion. And the same arguments would 
cover a good many instances in auto- 
matic communications, where the writer 
is presumably ignorant of the facts given 
through him or her and professes to be 
entirely unconscious during the perform- 
ance. 

In the instance I am about to relate, 
however, I think there is a reasonable 
amount of evidence, from the very 
nature of the episode, that the automatic 
writer was unconscious of her written 
communications. 

This writer was Miss Lizzie Maynard, 
the Australian girl mentioned in the 
George Eliot episode of my former book. 

Lizzie Maynard lived at Melbourne. 
Hearing that I was about to return to 
Sydney, she expressed a strong wish that 
I should make the acquaintance in the 
latter city of a very charming friend of 
hers, a Mrs. Cockshott, the sister of the 
famous Rolf Boldrewood. I took an in- 
troduction to this lady, therefore. Now 
Miss Maynard, when speaking of her 
friend who had been left a widow, told 
me what happiness it had been to her to 



176 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

be allowed to help Mrs. Cockshott by re- 
ceiving communications from her de- 
ceased husband. In the innocence of 
my heart I made some remark as to the 
nature of these communications — whether 
they showed that the husband was happy 
or some such general question. Lizzie 
Maynard looked genuinely shocked and 
said reproachfully, " Oh, Miss Bates, 
surely you cannot suppose I would 
glance at a single word in the letter of a 
man to his wife ? " I felt rather snubbed 
by this view of the case and answered 
rather feebly that I had supposed it 
would be impossible not to know what 
she wrote, though of course it would be 
a point of honor not to repeat it and to 
forget it as soon as possible. I apologized 
for my own indiscreet question but said 
truly it arose only from a kindly hope 
that the husband was quite happy in his 
new surroundings. 

" But I don't know what is written," 
Lizzie persisted earnestly. " I should 
hate to know a single word that is 
written from a husband to a wife. I 
could not agree to form the channel be- 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 177 

tween them if my automatic writing 
were not quite unconscious." 

I had accepted this statement at the 
time, but later, when talking to Mrs. 
Cockshott about Lizzie, scepticism had 
once more reasserted itself and I said — 

" Do you really believe Lizzie Maynard 
is absolutely unconscious of what she 
writes ? She gave me the impression of 
being a very conscientious and truthful 
girl, but do you think she deceives herself 
in the matter ? Perhaps she is conscious 
of what is said at the moment of writing, 
but forgets it immediately and cultivates 
this short memory as a question of 
honor?" 

"No," said Mrs. Cockshott, very de- 
cidedly. " I am sure Lizzie Maynard is 
not at any moment aware of what she 
writes, and I have the best of reasons for 
knowing this." Then she told me the 
following story — 

" As you have heard, I used to live in 
Melbourne myself and only came to 
Sydney a few years ago. I had grown 
very fond of Lizzie, and looked upon her 
almost as a child of my own. She has a 



178 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

most sweet and true nature, but she is 
rather inclined to think every one as 
good as she is herself and to be a little 
uncritical sometimes in making fresh ac- 
quaintances. There were some people 
whom she knew and was fond of in Mel- 
bourne whom I, with my wider knowl- 
edge of life, knew were not quite desir- 
able as the friends of such a young and 
inexperienced girl. I had never said 
much to her on the subject, but when 
leaving Melbourne and when Lizzie ex- 
pressed such great sorrow at losing me 
and ' wished she could think of anything 
to do that would please me, 7 I saw my 
chance and I said, ' Well, Lizzie, if you 
really wish to please me, do let me beg 
you to give up your acquaintance with 
the X family. They will do you no good. 
When I am away you will probably drop 
into still greater intimacy with them and 
I am sure it will not be good for you — 
you are very young and you are easily 
influenced by people you like. I wish 
you would make a promise before I go, 
that you will drop this acquaintanceship 
before it grows into a real friendship.' 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 179 

Rather reluctantly Lizzie did give me the 
promise and I never gave another thought 
to the subject, knowing that she was ab- 
solutely reliable. 

" I settled down in my Sydney house 
and several months passed, during which 
I was in the habit of receiving letters 
from my dear husband, through Lizzie's 
instrumentality. The girl also wrote to 
me herself from time to time, telling me 
of all her doings and giving me all the 
chit-chat of a young girl's life. All went 
well at first, but after a few months, the 
letter from my husband, forwarded by 
Lizzie, did not begin as he was wont to 
address me but in the following astonish- 
ing words which I have since realized 
did not come from my husband at all. 
His communication began lower down on 
the paper. 

" The opening words were : ( False 
Friend ! Do not trust her ! She has 
broken her word to you. She has been to 
see the X family since you left. Tax her 
with it and she cannot deny it. 1 

" Now this communication in Lizzie *s 
own handwriting was very distressing to 



180 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

me. I could not in the least understand 
how it had come about and I was most 
reluctant to accept it as fact. At length 
I determined not to write to her on the 
subject but to write as usual and thank 
her for my husband's letter, making no 
comment upon the astonishing words 
which headed the page. 

"In a few weeks I was going to Mel- 
bourne to stay with friends and knew I 
should have the opportunity of speaking 
quietly to Lizzie and finding out the 
truth. 

" This came about shortly afterward. 
When I ' taxed ' her with having broken 
her word to me, poor Lizzie was terribly 
upset. She made no attempt to deny the 
fact but burst into tears and said, ' I do 
think it is very, very unkind of people 
to have told you about it and to have 
tried to make mischief between us. I 
meant to tell you all about it the moment 
you came here and to explain how it 
happened. We were all down at Port 
Philip when a naval review was going on 
and I found myself absolutely side by 
side with the X family in the crowd of 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 181 

spectators. My mother and sisters were 
with me, and they begged us so hard to 
have a cup of tea with them before we 
went home that I could not refuse with- 
out surprising my own family, and act- 
ing very unkindly all round. I was not 
in the house for a quarter of an hour and 
I have never been there except that once, 
since you left Melbourne. It was cruel to 
tell you about it when I was not there to 
explain/ and poor Lizzie's tears burst out 
afresh. 

"I put my hand gently on her shoulder 
and said, ' My dear child, nobody has 
told me about it ; nobody has been cruel 
except yourself. You were my informant/ 
Lizzie looked up in blank astonishment 
and it was not until I had shown her the 
statement in her own handwriting that she 
could really be convinced that no third 
person had interfered." 

This was Mrs. Cockshott's evidence and 
I am bound to say I consider it strong, 
especially for any one who knew both the 
lady and the young girl. Others can, of 
course, spin elaborate theories of a subtly- 
concocted plan on the part of Lizzie for 



182 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

securing the confidence of Mrs. Cockshott, 
and vindicating her own claims. 

Such a thing would involve marvelous 
histrionic talent in this young and inno- 
cent girl, living a quiet, retired life with 
her mother and sisters and with no love 
of notoriety, nor chance of gaining it. 
Her mother, a greatly respected widow, 
came of a noted Scotch family, and her 
uncle was, at the time of my visit to the 
colonies, the owner of some of the most 
famous of the Scotch islands and was liv- 
ing on the family estates. This Scotch 
blood may have had something to do 
with Lizzie's exceptional psychic gift. 
She had never been to a seance and had 
never even seen a medium or professional 
clairvoyant in her life ; so her powers 
were quite natural and quite spontaneous. 
From a child she had been accustomed to 
the open doors which are closed for most 
of us — mercifully, perhaps. 

Lizzie Maynard's pure and innocent 
young life seemed to give her an im- 
munity from any disturbing experiences, 
with the exception of the one instance 
given, which was probably intended as a 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 183 

stern but necessary lesson. She only 
spoke to me of the naturalness of these 
experiences in her life. She had never 
known anything else and said it was her 
greatest happiness to be able now and 
then to help some friend by exercising 
her psychic power. 

Sir Oliver Lodge, in a kind letter of 
congratulation to me about the success 
of Seen and Unseen, says in referring to 
my automatic script, " I don't know how 
far you regard your writings as really apart 
from your own consciousness. I suppose in 
any case that the medium modifies and colors 
them f " This is a very pertinent question 
and remark. I quite agree with Sir 
Oliver Lodge that the channel through 
which such writings come, does and must 
color and modify them to some extent ; 
especially where the writings belong (as 
in my own case) to Classes I and II. 

Class III is perpetually confused with 
Class II by the writers themselves. It 
requires a very level head and an ex- 
tremely honest intelligence to " place " 
one's own performances accurately. So 
much passes as automatic writing that 



184 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

really ought not to be " placed " at all, 
being merely the outcome of one's normal 
intelligence ; but I do not think it is pos- 
sible for writing to amount to no more 
than this without our being aware of the 
fact if we are quite honest with ourselves. 
Therefore we may discuss this as belong- 
ing to the domain of conscious imposture, 
of which we are not at present speaking. 
But when Sir Oliver Lodge in the same 
letter says, " But on the other hand, the 
thoughts are not beyond your own range" 
he opens up a vast and very interesting 
question. 

In the logic of most people, to say this 
is synonymous with saying, " Therefore 
the thoughts emanate from your own sub- 
conscious self — if we are courteous enough 
to exclude the conscious self! " 

Now I am sure my distinguished cor- 
respondent is far too logical to have 
meant this. He points out possibilities, 
without dogmatizing about them, and 
leaves it at that. 

I see very strongly the force of his re- 
mark and recognize that in intuitional or 
inspirational writing it is impossible to 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 185 

convince any one but one's self and quite 
sufficiently hard to do that. 

I would point out, however, that 
thoughts may not be beyond your range 
and yet need not of necessity on that ac- 
count be fathered upon your subcon- 
scious self—that long-suffering parent of 
such a multitudinous and heterogeneous 
offspring ! 

It is of course quite legitimate and 
right that a scientific man should assume 
this source, in the absence of other proof, 
and where philosophical and not evi- 
dential utterances are on the tapis. I do 
not see why we should expect, or wish, 
to change his position. 

Only you yourself — the supposed writer 
— can have that sense of identity which 
makes you feel you are writing from dic- 
tation and not reproducing your own 
ideas ; you cannot convey this bit of the per- 
sonal equation to anybody else. 

It is a different matter when intuitional 
writing has to do with the practical af- 
fairs of other people. Here my writing 
has again and again been justified by 
events, often months later ; which events 



186 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

make it difficult to imagine any other 
source for the message than the one sug- 
gested.. 

Admiral Usborne Moore has quoted 
in general outline one or two such cases 
which came to him through me, in his 
lectures upon psychic subjects. 

These are the only satisfactory proofs 
of the source of one's automatic script and 
it is through these experiences, in addi- 
tion to the sense of identity (the personal 
presence of the communicator), which 
lead me to trust also the less evidential 
cases, where philosophical or literary 
questions alone are involved. If you 
have been inspired by an outside intelli- 
gence in the one case, why not also in the 
other ? 

To draw a hard and fast line that all 
questions relating to family affairs, etc., 
come " out of the blue," but that all 
questions connected with theology or 
philosophy are of necessity the outcome 
of your extremely deceitful or hopelessly 
hoodwinked subconscious self, seems to 
me to be both arbitrary and absurd. 

Each case must be weighed upon its 



AUTOMATIC WRITING 187 

own merits and we cannot expect to 
convey to any other person the fact of 
spirit recognition, which practically 
satisfies us that our friends are with 
us. 

And here we must for the present be 
content to leave this much vexed and 
not altogether satisfactory subject. It 
may lead to much self-deception and is 
probably a greater factor in the produc- 
tion of " swelled head " than anything 
else upon earth ! 

It is obviously easy to get opinions 
from the Unseen to back up all our pet 
prejudices, if the latter are only strong 
enough and we ourselves not sufficiently 
on guard. To be looked upon as a Del- 
phic oracle, ready to reel out cryptic 
sentences of warning and advice, or to 
act as Mistress of the Ceremonies between 
this sphere and the next, is surely enough 
to turn any but the strongest head 
amongst us ? 

A famous music-master in the days of 
my girlhood, once gave me his best ad- 
vice for "practicing." " The rule for 
practicing is always to play slowly, and the 



188 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

rule for playing slowly is always to play 
slower." I think we may say the same 
as regards metapsychics. 

Let us learn to go slowly, for if we do 
not go piano we shall certainly not go 
sano ; and the psychic researcher who 
does not pray for a level head will inevi- 
tably discover some day that he has de- 
veloped a " swelled " one ! 



■ 



CHAPTER X 

MATEEIALIZATION 

In one sense, all " physical phenomena" 
(to use a technical expression) may be 
classed as materialization, but we are 
speaking here more specially of the 
materialization of the physical form. I 
prefer this latter word, to the human 
form, simply because the most complete 
and satisfactory materializations which I 
have seen could not be described as iden- 
tical with the human form, either in ap- 
pearance, or to the touch — a still more 
stringent test. 

My own experiences with regard to 
materialization have been already fully 
described in a book written many years 
ago and entitled A Year in the Great Re- 
public, and also in my recent work Seen 
and Unseen. It is unnecessary to go over 
the well-trodden ground once more. I 
should like, however, to mention (for the 
point needs emphasis) that I have never 
189 



190 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

found these materialized figures identical 
with human beings in outward appear- 
ance, but I have found them identical 
with those they profess to be in person- 
ality, in knowledge of small details of af- 
fectionate intercourse in past years and in 
just those little touches of actuality so 
difficult to convey to one's readers but so 
convincing to one's self. 

This is just what makes the theory of 
personation by evil spirits of one's friends 
and relations from the other side so diffi- 
cult to entertain. A designing spirit* 
would naturally find out and learn up 
facts, even small and telling ones, in 
prosecution of his deceitful purpose, but 
he would find it hard to recall the special 
perfume used upon earth and which you 
have yourself forgotten until the scent is 
once more wafted to you ; the little tricks 
of manner and expression which were as 
much a part of your friend as his features. 
On the assumption of fraud, all these are 
far more difficult to reproduce than the 
actual physical features, yet these are 
just what have been reproduced in my own 
experience, when the general " make up " 



MATERIALIZATION 191 

of the manifesting entity was sketchy and 
unfinished. Therefore when I read long 
descriptions of silk masks and " lazy 
tongs," and concealed muslin and so 
forth, or when these are produced as a 
full and satisfactory explanation of all I 
have seen and heard in this way, I feel that 
the real essence of the experiences is be- 
ing evaded. This demonstrates the pres- 
ence of strong prejudice and the entire 
absence of the scientific instinct. Science, 
if it takes up these subjects at all, must 
reckon with all the facts, not pick and 
choose just those which pink silk and 
fluffy muslin can cover and then say, 
" We have explained the facts which ad- 
mit of the most obvious explanation and 
therefore it is unnecessary to go into the 
other facts which you affirm. No doubt 
the rest was all imagination." This is a 
very loose and unsatisfactory way of 
working, if the work is worth doing at 
all. Far be it from me to say that it is 
only scientists who sin in this manner. 
On the contrary I should say it is the 
almost universal method of approaching 
inconvenient experiences. " Give the 



192 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

easiest explanation that occurs to you of 
the more strictly material part of the 
phenomena and leave severely alone the 
more difficult and less objective parts of 
the narrative. Don't dispute the forms, 
because you can explain them away ; but 
fight tooth and nail against the little 
touches of actuality which you cannot ex- 
plain and put these all down to imagina- 
tion." Then why not put the forms also 
down to imagination? That would at 
least be logical. All this is very human 
but it is not science. That is all I wish to 
point out. A chemist doesn't fall in love 
with certain chemical bodies and analyze 
them and explain their component parts 
and ignore and refuse to analyze other 
bodies because he does not like them and 
therefore prefers to ignore their exist- 
ence ! 

It is just these apparently trivial but 
really enormously important details of 
actuality which need understanding and 
explaining. We know so much nowadays 
about trap-doors and concealed assistants 
and silk muslin hoisted on long sticks 
and phosphorus floating about in secret 



MATERIALIZATION 193 

places. Let us get on a step further and 
confront honestly the undoubted facts 
which are more difficult to explain or to 
explain away. 

Some years ago, when Eusapia Palladino 
was " found out cheating " (as I was told 
on my arrival near Cambridge at the 
time) I accepted the statement as final. 
There was absolutely no appeal from it 
and I knew Mr. and Mrs. Frederick 
Myers as being above suspicion and cer- 
tainly competent to decide the question, 
having had Eusapia for many weeks in 
their house, under close observation. 

The first thing which shook my incre- 
dulity was the elaborate account given 
by Mr. Maskelyne (who had been invited 
to go down to Cambridge with his son 
and investigate the fraud) in the Daily 
Chronicle. I think that was the paper. 
He explained so exhaustively how the 
physical movement of furniture, etc., 
might have been effected and therefore 
no doubt ivas effected. The explanation 
involved swallowing the curious sugges- 
tion that a woman could lean back in 
her chair and seize another chair in her 



194 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

teeth whilst held on either side ; could 
convey this chair in her teeth over her 
own head and place it on the floor about 
three feet in front of her, without detec- 
tion by the intelligent observers who were 
holding her hands meanwhile. This was 
rather a " large order " upon my com- 
mon sense, but my faith in her unfaith 
was very robust and I managed to swal- 
low even this, pro tern. But the limit of 
my credulity was reached when I found 
that Mr. Maskelyne left severely alone 
the small facts which were so significant 
and yet did not admit of an explanation, 
even upon these heroic lines. Here my 
powers of belief broke down and I real- 
ized that I was reading the letter of a 
special pleader, starting with foregone 
conclusions and not of a scientific mind, 
with keen powers of observation and 
anxious only for truth. 

Therefore when Eusapia was rehabili- 
tated later through the more scientific 
methods of the French savants and Mr. 
Myers himself had generously assisted at 
these investigations and reconsidered his 
previous verdict, I was not at all sur- 



MATERIALIZATION 195 

prised. It must ever remain to the credit 
of the scientific instinct of Sir Oliver 
Lodge that he steadfastly refused to 
throw up his cap on the side of the 
crowd, and remained firm in his convic- 
tion that mere trickery could not and 
did not cover the ground of his personal 
researches in the Palladino case. 

Apart from professional materializing 
mediums I had the great interest and 
privilege of meeting Mrs. Corner (the 
Florrie Cook of old) in the flat of a 
private friend, who kindly gave me this 
chance and allowed me to invite two per- 
sonal friends — Mr. and Mrs. Harrington 
— to share it. We were a very small 
party on that occasion, only seven or 
eight persons in all. As I am rather a 
punctual person I arrived in very good 
time and found my hostess (whom I have 
known and respected for several years 
past) entirely alone in her tiny flat. A 
few minutes later Mrs. Corner arrived 
and Miss Macartney went to the front 
door of the flat and let her in. She 
came into the drawing-room almost im- 
mediately with her hostess ; a small 



196 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

woman in a tight-fitting black dress ; 
and we all three chatted together for a 
time. A little behind time my two 
friends arrived and then two friends of 
Miss Macartney and we sat down for the 
stance. There was not even room for a 
cabinet, so a piece of cretonne chintz had 
been stretched across an angle of the 
little drawing-room with a running tape 
secured by a nail to either wall. A less 
elaborate preparation could scarcely have 
been made and the chintz could not have 
been hung more than Hve feet from the 
ground, for I looked over it quite easily 
before taking my seat, and there were 
only some cushions placed on the floor 
for Mrs. Corner when she went into 
trance. In a very short time Mrs. Cor- 
ner's guide " Marie " appeared at the 
opening of the curtains, a tall woman 
dressed in white whom little Mrs. Corner 
and her small, fragile hostess could cer- 
tainly not have brought into the room 
concealed beneath their skirts, whilst I 
was talking to them both for a good 
twenty minutes before the rest of our 
friends arrived and this in full light ! 



MATERIALIZATION 197 

The moment Marie's white figure ap- 
peared at the opening of the chintz cur- 
tains, my friend, Mrs. Harrington, eagerly 
stretched forward from her chair — (the 
room was so small that we were quite 
close to the angle already described) — 
and attempted to shake hands with the 
materialized figure. This was sternly re- 
sented by the latter, a Frenchwoman, 
who spoke excellent and rather voluble 
French. 

" Non ! Non ! Je ne veux pas que tu 
fasses comme 9a. Je ne te connais pas. 
Je ne t'ai pas demande," etc., etc. 

She seemed very much put out by this 
breach of the convenances, which amused 
Mrs. Harrington and me very much. 
We should doubtless have thought the 
incident very " suspicious " if Marie had 
not almost instantly dispersed such an 
idea by putting her hand out to me and 
begging me to come nearer to her. I 
stood up at once and clasped both her 
hands which she placed in mine without 
any hesitation, saying a few sentences of 
kindly welcome, thus showing that she 
did not object to contact in itself, but 



198 DO THE DEAD DEPAET? 

liked to exercise choice in making the 
acquaintance of her sitters. Surely a 
not unreasonable prejudice? Marie 
talked very freely and with none of the 
physical difficulty so often to be observed 
with these mysterious visitors. 

Miss Macartney accounted for this by 
the fact that she was thoroughly accus- 
tomed to her earth visits and not in the 
position of those friends of the sitters 
who only come at long intervals and 
have had little practice in speaking 
through the temporary embodiment. 

Some one asked her about her earth 
life and I have never forgotten the 
pathetic answer. " I don't want to tell 
you about it," she said gently. " I don't 
want to recall it. I was not very happy 
and I was not very good." This was all 
said in excellent French. I think we all 
regretted that the question had been 
asked and had stirred such sad memories. 
I cannot recall the exact words, but she 
certainly gave us to understand that her 
present work was a sort of expiation for 
the past. Perhaps she had been the 
cause of leading her fellow-creatures 



MATERIALIZATION 199 

astray in the old earth days and was 
now allowed to make restitution by help- 
ing those sunk in the world of matter, to 
a more spiritual realization of life, by 
demonstrating a further life to be lived 
when this one has ceased. That such 
demonstration should come in the most 
material and the least spiritual way is 
only what might be expected under the 
circumstances. 

Marie told us however that her work 
of expiation was nearly accomplished, 
that she would shortly be withdrawn to 
less material spheres and that her present 
medium would also soon leave the world. 
" What do you mean by soon f " said Mr. 
Harrington. " Within about a year," 
she answered, " but nobody must speak 
to her about it." Of course we made the 
desired promise. As a matter of fact 
Mrs. Corner did pass away within the 
year. Doubtless Marie saw the event as 
imminent, but such prophecies are fre- 
quently falsified. More than ten years 
ago a similar prophecy was made in my 
hearing with regard to Mr. Charlton 
Speer and I am happy to say this has not 



200 DO THE DEAD DEPAKT? 

been verified although it came from an 
accredited source. So we are bound in 
such things to take the " misses" as well 
as the " hits/' and in my experience the 
misses " have it " as regards accuracy in 
time prophecies. Many things, ap- 
parently impossible at the time, come to 
pass truly enough, but very seldom at 
the date indicated. It is far better to 
face and acknowledge this fact and try to 
see what is indicated by it, than to at- 
tempt to stretch facts to fit prophecies. 

To finish my sketch of the Corner 
evening I may mention a small incident 
which interested me greatly. During 
Marie's visit we heard a thud on the 
floor, behind the chintz, and Miss 
Macartney said at once, " Oh, I'm afraid 
Mrs. Corner's head must have fallen off 
the cushion." She stepped at once be- 
tween the curtains, leaving them open for 
the moment There was quite enough 
light to see Miss Macartney bending over 
the prostrate form of Mrs. Corner who 
lay on the floor with her head to the 
right as we faced her. The cushions had 
slipped and were carefully readjusted by 



MATEKIALIZATION 201 

our hostess. At the same moment I saw 
the tall figure of Marie to the left facing us 
and looking down with anxiety upon her 
medium. 

It was all over in a few moments, but 
it was a most interesting experience and 
one I could not have had, if Miss Macart- 
ney's eagerness to replace the pillows un- 
der Mrs. Corner's head had not resulted 
in leaving the curtains open for the time 
being. In the interest of non-psychics I 
may mention that although none of us 
know the actual conditions of materializa- 
tion, the suggestion is that as infinite 
particles of matter are known to be float- 
ing about in our atmosphere (witness the 
dust revealed by sunbeams, etc.), these 
can be extracted and added to the emana- 
tions from the medium and other sitters 
and worked up through some process at 
present unknown to us, into a temporary 
covering for the etheric body of the com- 
municating intelligence, who thus comes 
within the cognizance of the normal five 
senses of the physical body, as at present 
constituted. There must certainly be 
some special and peculiar quality in the 



202 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

individuality of the medium which ap- 
pears to be essential to the process, for all 
mediums are not materializing mediums. 
The process as indicated on these broad 
and vague lines is no more essentially 
unscientific than the chemical process 
through which a charge of electricity can 
be put through a solution and result in a 
deposit at the bottom of the glass. 

Given the solution. The atmosphere in- 
cluding emanations from medium and 
sitters. 

The charge of electricity. The process 
through which the infinite particles can 
be collected and condensed round the 
etheric body. 

The deposit. The materialization of the 
latter. 

Nowadays such a theory can scarcely 
be called illegitimate or very fanciful. 
Science has had to accept theories quite 
as wonderful as necessary working hy- 
potheses. 

We are told that the process of materi- 
alization is far from being an easy one on 
either side of the Veil and that it has to 
be taught and practiced like any other 



MATERIALIZATION 203 

art. We are also told that those who ap- 
pear to us require much assistance from 
friends better versed in the necessary 
conditions. It is to be regretted that we 
cannot, as a rule, receive more definite 
particulars as to these latter. The diffi- 
culty may lie, partly at least, in our 
inability to grasp conditions with which 
we are not personally familiar. This re- 
quires imagination and unfortunately 
there is a prejudice against exercising 
this divine gift, even to gain knowledge. 
Imagination is too generally considered 
synonymous with inaccuracy and want 
of judgment. Yet the big things of the 
world would never have come to pass had 
not some scientists at least, been endowed 
with this heaven-born capacity. Their 
imagination pointed out a possible road, 
where others saw only a cut de sac, and 
their calm judgment and critical faculty 
were used as legs for walking in it — not 
merely as irons for the manufacture of 
drags. 

Materialization is one of the various 
ways in which our " dead " may return 
to us. I have great sympathy with those 



204 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

who say they would rather never see 
their beloved ones again than see them 
under these circumstances, in a seance 
room. Probably most of us feel this and 
with good reason. But I think there is 
often a failure to recognize that one man's 
poison may be literally another man's 
meat. I do not think it is a very desira- 
ble or edifying process to be always 
haunting the materializing seance room. 
It may easily degenerate into a sort of 
psychic dram-drinking, but this form of 
phenomena is not to be despised in its 
legitimate place, as affording proof of the 
continuity of existence to many people 
who demand the most material proofs ob- 
tainable, and can be approached in no 
other way. It makes me sometimes very 
impatient when I hear so many people 
say, " /don't like the idea of materializing 
stances. They would never convince me. 
They are so vulgar and such silly, stupid 
jokes are often made by the so-called 
spirits, /should hate to see my husband 
or father or mother in a crowd of vulgar 
curiosity-seekers," and so forth. And 
then they proceed to condemn the whole 



MATERIALIZATION 205 

subject wholesale and to declare that this 
particular form of phenomena ought not 
to be countenanced at all. 

Sometimes I feel inclined to say, " My 
dear, good creatures ! Does it ever sug- 
gest itself to you that you and your likes 
and dislikes and ideas and prejudices are 
not the only existences in the world ? 
Personally I don't like materializations. 
Neither do I like tripe and onions, which 
I look upon as a rather vulgar and unde- 
sirable food. But if I were upon a desert 
island and a well-cooked dish of tripe 
and onions floated toward me I should 
accept it gladly, as a sign that friendly, 
if not entirely refined, neighbors might 
be near me in my desolation. So many 
people are on a desert island as regards 
the future. If we ourselves are upon the 
mainland, all the more reason we should 
sympathize with those less fortunately 
placed ! Why grudge them the ray of 
light, no matter through what window it 
may chance to come ? " 

Before closing this chapter I should 
like to make a short but earnest plea on 
a subject already dealt with in so efficient 



206 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

a way by Mrs. Charles Finch of the Psy- 
chic Annals j the subject of the investiga- 
tion of fraud, specially in materializing 
circles and in the case of mediums who 
have at other times proved themselves efficient 
and able to produce phenomena without any 
resort to normal assistance. 

It seems almost impossible to induce 
anybody to take up this subject from a 
scientific and unprejudiced point of view. 
The very mention of it is enough to make 
most people foam at the mouth. You 
are accused of wishing to condone fraud, 
to extenuate the sin and whitewash the 
sinner and so forth and so on. It is a 
case of " Strike but hear " and that is 
just what nobody will do. " Punish the 
cheat but, as a matter of science, investigate 
the conditions under which the cheating took 
place." Of course I am not referring to 
the cases of hardened and well-known 
impostors whose whole stock-in-trade is 
a bag of conjuring tricks. But there are 
numerous cases where mediums oi known 
probity, under ordinary circumstances, 
who have given test after test under con- 
ditions perfectly satisfactory to the most 



MATERIALIZATION 207 

critical investigator, have yet been found 
cheating in the most unmistakable man- 
ner, after years of honest work. Now 
these are cases which I maintain should 
be carefully investigated, not with a view 
of minimizing facts but of trying to see 
whether some interesting scientific knowl- 
edge of the best instruments to use and 
the best way of protecting these instru- 
ments, may not merge. I do not wish 
to go further in a book of this kind. I 
would only suggest that our instruments 
in this scientific research are our mediums, 
and that we are all lamentably ignorant 
as to the use and abuse of these instru- 
ments. Unfortunately our professional 
investigators are the most ignorant of 
all as a rule. Most of them have ob- 
viously cultivated only one of the many 
facts of that wonderful and as yet myth- 
ical stone — truly the philosopher's stone 
which makes the ideal investigator. Our 
professional investigators are, as a rule, 
mere detectives, excellent where a crime 
has really been committed but inclined 
to find a thief in every household, as un- 
erringly as a great specialist is apt to de- 



208 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

tect his speciality in every human body. 
Even to mention a calm investigation of 
certain acts of premeditated fraud is 
enough to make these psychic detectives 
show you the door and decline to hear 
another word of such pernicious non- 
sense. They feel that the world's eye 
is upon them. They have won appro- 
bation through their drastic methods 
and intend to keep it by the same 
means. It is quite natural — but again 
it is not science. True science investigates 
every mud heap, if the smallest chance 
of the least little bit of a fact emerging 
from the bottom of the mud can possibly 
exist. She does not pick up her skirts 
and pass by, saying to the admiring 
public, " See how I hate all this dirt and 
mud ! How repugnant it is to me ! 
Just notice how clean my feet are ! I 
would not pass within a yard of that 
horrible mud and refuse ! " The scien- 
tist does not do this, but the professional 
investigator is very apt to do it. This 
is why he is not the ideal investigator. 

Those of us who have any personal, as 
well as practical, experience of psychic 



MATERIALIZATION 209 

laws know only too well what the force 
of hypnotic suggestion may be. I have 
heard distinguished doctors and scientists 
who use hypnosis for remedial purposes, 
declare enthusiastically that it cannot pos- 
sibly tamper with the moral character of 
the patient. Possibly not when used 
from the highest motives and in their 
own individual case ; but once open the 
door and good as well as bad can enter in 
here as elsewhere. Add to this fact the 
enormous amount of unconscious hypno- 
tism that is going on around us every 
day and every hour of the day, hypno- 
tism that may be as unconscious on the 
part of the agent as it is with the unfor- 
tunate victim. Add to this again the 
innumerable cases where the influence is 
consciously used and used for a bad pur- 
pose. How many men and women can 
trace their ruin, physical or spiritual or 
both, to bad companions ; to some one 
who lured them on and whose influence 
they were not strong enough to resist ; by 
degrees the silken threads of attraction 
and infatuation became iron chains of 
destiny, What has this been, all along 



210 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

the ages, but hypnotism pur et simple? 
Some people seem to think that a certain 
process only began when a modern name 
had been found for it ! In the face of 
these known facts, how absurd to say that 
hypnotic suggestion cannot interfere with 
the moral instinct of the one who receives 
the suggestion ! In one sense no doubt 
the doctor is right. What he means is 
this : He gives a suggestion for health 
to the patient and it is acted upon. He 
takes a paper-knife in his hand and tells 
the patient to stab him or some one else 
in the room and this suggestion is not 
acted upon. Then the doctor reads a 
paper upon the curative properties of 
hynotic suggestion and boldly asserts 
that he is in a position to state from per- 
sonal experiment that hypnotic sugges- 
tion cannot tamper with moral instincts. 
He forgets that he is probably more or 
less a stranger to his patient and may 
exercise no special magnetic attraction 
over the latter. He forgets also that 
when he puts the ivory paper-cutter into 
the patient's hands he does not wish the 
latter to kill anybody — it is merely a 



MATEKIALIZATION 211 

verbal suggestion of murder — not a sug- 
gestion that comes from his own heart 
and will, but exactly the contrary. It is 
the very crudest experiment and a most 
misleading one. 

We all need to be on our guard against 
hypnotic influences and I think most 
people are wise if they refuse physical 
cures that can only be obtained at the 
risk of leaving open doors, through which 
less scrupulous operators may enter. 

Now postulate the presence of this mag- 
netic attraction and influence, exercised 
by discarnate entities from a less limited 
sphere than our own. Allow for the mo- 
ment that such entities have a strong wish 
to discredit their victims and thus delay 
a movement which threatens to throw 
light upon their deed of darkness, and we 
have here the exact conditions that may 
be present when a medium — who has given 
evidence of true psychic gifts again and 
again — is caught out in some clumsy 
trick. It will be objected to this, " Yes, 
that may be specious enough where a 
sudden and spontaneous bit of trickery is 
in question, such as some of Eusapia 



212 bo the! dead Depart? 

Palladino's movements, for example, but 
how about premeditated frauds, where se- 
cret recesses are found in armchairs or 
silk muslin is hidden in a musical box ? " 
Remember that I am referring only to 
those mediums who have given indis- 
putable proof of capacity to produce 
genuine phenomena in past years. In 
such cases I do not see that even musical 
boxes or dummy armchairs make the 
hypothesis impossible. My own personal 
experience has been that there are prac- 
tically no bounds to the powers of evil 
suggestion acting upon a sensitive brain. 
/ know this to be true. It is no theory. 
These suggestions naturally work upon 
the plane of each person's individual cir- 
cumstances. Many of us are quite un- 
conscious of the real source of our thought 
suggestions. That is worst of all, because 
these can only be effectually routed 
through prayer and exercise of strong 
will power. If I were an over-sensitized 
medium, obliged to exercise my powers 
for a living, giving sittings for materiali- 
zation two or three times a week ; with 
waning genuine power and enfeebled 



MATEEIALIZATION 213 

brain and intellect (thanks to constant 
and promiscuous control) I can imagine 
it quite possible that a stronger vitality 
might obsess and even completely rule 
out my own moral sense and subjugate 
my common sense as well. 

For nobody whose common sense was 
intact would leave an incriminating arm- 
chair stuffed with " stage properties " in 
the house of a rival medium for a fort- 
night ! I do not think it is necessary to 
postulate the influence of discarnate enti- 
ties in such a case. It might be the up- 
rush of the medium's lower ego, where 
the normal ego had submitted to deterio- 
rating conditions — or again it might very 
possibly be the mental suggestion from 
some one in the flesh — perhaps even a 
rival operator in these fields of investiga- 
tion. I suggested the discarnate entities 
first merely because I have received un- 
questionable proof that they have tried 
again and again to put stumbling-blocks 
in my own path whenever it has led in 
the direction of any attempt to help my 
fellow-creatures. They leave me bliss- 
fully and peacefully undisturbed and un- 



214 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

hampered when I am only occupied in 
personal enjoyment or success. 

I am not trying to whitewash anybody. 
I am speaking solely in the interests of 
science. I believe that what we most 
need just now in this research is a knowl- 
edge of conditions. This is the point where 
we are most ignorant. And I see that in 
a sane, unprejudiced investigation of pos- 
sible causes of unaccountable fraud where 
a previous good record has been observed, 
lies one of our best clues — hitherto ne- 
glected and ignored — but which may yet 
prove of inestimable value in leading us 
through the maze. 

Far away the best conditions for scien- 
tific investigation of the materialization 
problem would be to discard professional 
mediumship altogether and form a circle 
of known and trusted friends. The proc- 
ess would probably be a long one and 
would need much patience, perseverance, 
and, above all, self-sacrifice, even after 
the particular quality of mediumship in- 
volved might have been obtained. 

Science has demanded stern sacrifices 
in the past — health and even life itself — 



MATERIALIZATION 215 

and she has never asked in vain. There- 
fore there need be no difficulty here as 
regards a little sacrifice of time and in- 
clination. With the "lay" world it is 
another matter, and doubtless we find 
here the reason for the absence of any 
strenuous private investigations of the 
most startling and sensational of all 
psychic phenomena. 

I can best illustrate this point by a 
personal reminiscence — 

A few years ago, an old friend of mine — 
a well-known consulting civil engineer 
— made me a very " sporting " offer. He 
said to me, " You seem to believe in the 
possibility of these so-called materializa- 
tions. I believe that the whole show is 
unmitigated humbug. But if you can suc- 
ceed in convincing me that the facts are 
genuine, I will promise, on my side, to read 
a paper on the subject at the next General 
Meeting of Civil Engineers." I closed 
with this magnificent offer on the spot 
and proceeded to discuss preliminaries. 

" Of course you would not accept any- 
thing happening in the house of a pro- 
fessional medium ? " 



216 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

" Certainly not — nor in my own house, 
if one of those scoundrels were present," 
was the uncompromising reply. 

" Just so ; you are quite right ; the 
only satisfactory plan is to find your own 
circle and submit to a fairly long inves- 
tigation. Probably no results would be 
obtained for two or three months, amongst 
absolute novices, and it would not be wise 
to sit more than once a week as there is 
considerable drain on the vitality." 

He assented cheerfully to all this, with 
a suspicious gleam of merriment when I 
referred to the supposed loss of vitality 
involved by the experiments. Then came 
the real crux of the matter. Quite inno- 
cently I reminded him that a little phys- 
ical training would be expedient and even 
necessary, under the circumstances. 

" Of course you must train a bit if you 
hope to qualify as a materializing medium 
— not much meat at first and none at all 
for the last few weeks. Plasmon and 
grape nuts and quaker oats are very 
nutritious, I am told." His face fell, but 
he nodded assent nevertheless ; " and of 
course you must give up stimulants for 



MATERIALIZATION 217 

the time being entirely — oh, }^es ! and I 
forgot tobacco — that is most obstructive — 
you cannot possibly get any results if you 
drink whiskies and sodas and smoke 
cigars or even cigarettes. Meat and alco- 
hol and tobacco smoke are quite prohibi- 
tive if you are hoping to develop a pri- 
vate circle." 

This was the final straw ! " Good 
heavens ! " he exclaimed in very un- 
affected astonishment, " you don't expect 
me to go in for all that ? of course that 
is quite impossible." 

So he cried off the bargain and went 
away surprised, if not " sorrowful." 
Anyway I heard no more of that paper 
which might have been read — by a con- 
vinced sceptic — before the General Meet- 
ing of Civil Engineers. 



CHAPTER XI 

HOW THE DEAD DEPART 

The previous chapters of this book 
have had to do — more or less directly — 
with the return of the dead. It may be 
interesting to my readers if I may make 
a few notes here upon circumstances 
connected with the departure of some 
whom I have known. 

Three years ago I was spending a 
month of convalescence in a pleasant 
hotel on the South Coast. I had heard 
of this hotel for some years past and its 
greatest recommendation for comfort was 
the fact that a certain distinguished 
officer and his wife had made it their 
home for nine years. A friend of mine 
was in the house at the time and she in- 
troduced me to this lady and gentleman. 
I liked them both extremely and found 
many points of contact with the wife, 
who had much knowledge and ex- 
perience of psychic matters. I never 
218 



HOW THE DEAD DEPART 219 

discussed these subjects with her kindly 
and courteous husband but understood 
from her that he was in no way inimical 
to them. The year after my visit there 
I was grieved to hear of the general's 
death. He was such a modest man that 
it was only after reading the long 
obituary notices of his distinguished 
military services in The Times and else- 
where, that I realized what a gallant soul 
had been hidden under that very quiet, 
unassuming personality. 

Some months later I met his widow 
once more in London ; and she then 
gave me the following curious details 
about the passing away of her husband. 
He had been ailing for some time but 
had not kept his bed for very long. A 
professional nurse had been engaged and 
the lady (whom I will call Mrs. Burdett) 
was always in attendance upon her 
husband when the former was " off duty " 
for a time. Upon one of these occasions 
and before the last change had taken 
place, Mrs. Grove (the nurse) had left the 
room and Mrs. Burdett took up her posi- 
tion on a rather uncomfortable chair at 



220 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

the foot of the general's bed. He ap- 
peared to be suffering a great deal and 
she thought to herself rather bitterly, 
" Surely this suffering might be spared 
him," when at that very moment she 
heard with the " inner ear " a voice that 
said, " Go and sit on that other chair. It 
will be more comfortable for you. 11 She 
obeyed almost instinctively and seated 
herself in an armchair, farther from the 
bed but within sight of the patient, who 
seemed now to be breathing very heavily. 
The voice by her side then said, as if in 
answer to her thought, u I am not there. 
I am here, close to you. 77 

" Where are you ? " she answered 
calmly. " Close to your right knee. I 
have withdrawn from the body ; what you 
are watching is only the withdrawal of the 
cosmic life. 1 '' At that moment Mrs. Grove 
entered the room and quietly bent over 
her patient. 

" There has been a great change here," 
she said in a low voice before Mrs. 
Burdett had spoken to her. Yet the 
general " lived " (in ordinary parlance) for 
some sixteen or eighteen hours after this 



HOW THE BEAD DEPART 221 

remarkable experience ; but he never re- 
gained consciousness. I have always felt 
convinced that in the case of the passing 
away of a favorite brother of mine in 
September, 1906, something of the same 
kind took place. 

Through very trying circumstances I 
was unable to be with him at the time 
and was living through a most miserable 
and anxious experience at Eastbourne, 
with a kind friend who was also a friend 
of my brother. 

I had received news of a change for the 
worse which made my continued absence 
unnecessary, but the final telegram came 
on Sunday morning and there was no 
means of reaching my brother that day. 

By leaving Eastbourne at 6 a. m. the 
next morning I could have arrived about 
noon, but a special family circumstance 
made it advisable for his sake that I 
should not arrive until the afternoon. I 
was racked with anxiety, not knowing 
what to do for the best, and went to bed 
in this state, feeling that if a strong im- 
pulse came upon me to get up at five 
o'clock and catch this early train I had 



222 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

better act upon it and take any possible 
consequences. Had I known then, what 
proved to be the case, that my brother 
had been already unconscious when the 
telegram was sent, my course would have 
-been plain, and I should have taken the 
early train. 

For many nights I had had no natural 
sleep and had been forced to take drugs, 
and my kind friend was in the habit of 
coming in every morning to my bedside 
at 7 a. m. by which time I was always 
awake. 

That night I never closed my eyes in 
spite of the sedative. All night long the 
questions raced through my distraught 
brain : " Shall I take the early train ? 
or shall I go later? " 

There was no definite answer possible, 
for either action would involve risks. 
But as the dawn broke (it was about 
5 a. m.), instead of my being more and 
more tormented by anxiety a profound 
sense of calm and peace fell upon me — 
I had no desire to get up and catch the 
train in feverish haste. 

The feeling of peace came quite sud- 



HOW THE DEAD DEPART 223 

denly and through no conscious exercise 
of thought. " It is all right now. I have 
to lie still and keep quiet. It is all quite 
right." I did not fall asleep at all but 
for the next two hours I felt this curious 
sense of peace and satisfaction, although 
nothing was altered since I came to bed. 

When my friend arrived at 7 or 
7 : 30 a. m. to see whether I had left the 
hotel or not, she found me quite calm 
and composed, to her great surprise and 
satisfaction. 

I told her at once of my sudden feel- 
ing of repose and certainty that " all was 
quite right," and she said at once, " Then 
you think he has rallied again and taken 
a turn for the better? " " I don't know 
about that," I said. " I had no impres- 
sion about a rally but I feel it is all right 
and that I am to stay quiet until I hear 
more." 

For the first time that morning I did 
not receive the usual telegram. By 
1 p. m., just before I should have started, a 
telegram from a relative was handed to 
me, saying that my brother had passed 
away at noon } but not telling me that he 



224 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

was unconscious. This naturally dis- 
tressed me very much for a few hours ; 
but ample details reached me from his 
trusted valet saying that he had been 
unconscious, as a matter of fact, since the 
previous Saturday evening. 

In the face of Mrs. Burdett's expe- 
rience, I can explain the mystery of my 
sudden sense of calm and peace at 5 a. m., 
on the Monday morning. I feel sure 
that the spirit of my brother left the 
physical body at that hour and that he 
was with me, although I was too miser- 
able to receive a more definite impression 
of his presence just then. I have no 
doubt at all that the cosmic life alone 
remained until noon and that its depar- 
ture alone was watched during the last 
half hour by the relative who sent me 
the telegram. 

Only the other day I received an inter- 
esting and consoling incident from one 
of my brother's oldest friends. This lady 
— Mrs. Packard — has had a tragic story 
connected with the mutiny. She went 
out to India as a young bride six months 
before the fatal 10th of May, 1857. Her 



HOW THE DEAD DEPART 225 

husband was the adjutant of my brother's 
regiment and was mortally wounded on 
the same occasion when my brother was 
severely wounded at Jullundar, i. e. f 7th 
June, 1857. Adjutant Packard lingered 
from the fatal Sunday until the follow- 
ing Friday. On the intervening Tuesday 
morning his poor little son was born, and 
lived a few hours. The heroic wife had 
been placed the day previously in a bed 
by the side of her dying husband and the 
little dead child lay in her arms all Tues- 
day afternoon and evening, until they 
took it from her to be buried. On the 
Tuesday there had appeared to be a short 
rally in the adjutant's condition, but these 
symptoms soon disappeared. The devoted 
wife and now desolate mother managed 
to drag herself on to his bed and lay there 
with her arms round him, whispering 
comfort and consolation, until he also 
was removed from her and the poor young 
creature was left alone in a strange land 
and in the midst of unspeakable horrors. 
My brother was a mere boy at the time, 
but he always recalled her goodness to 
him after her husband's death and before 



226 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

she was taken away to the hills by kindly 
fellow sufferers. In later years they met 
again and there was naturally a strong 
bond of friendship between them, based 
upon these old tragic associations. Their 
friendship, however, had no common 
ground in theological beliefs. Mrs. Pack- 
ard has remained faithful to the evangel- 
ical traditions to which she was born and 
in which both her father and husband 
had been educated ; whilst my brother 
had emerged from these into a wider con- 
ception of spiritual evolution. Unfor- 
tunately he felt bound to try and impart 
something of his own enlarged vision to 
her ; whereas she naturally felt equally 
bound to be loyal to the convictions of a 
lifetime. 

Although this could not break the 
bond between them, it occasioned a little 
friction sometimes. This always appeared 
to me regrettable and unnecessary. I 
pointed out to my brother that as Mrs. 
Packard so obviously possessed the mys- 
terious but unmistakable gift of true 
spirituality, why not meet upon that 
ground and leave all minor details (even 



HOW THE DEAD DEPAET 227 

those that appeared to her essentials) 
alone ? But he always continued to send 
her progressive books and to insist upon 
his broader view of things, and I believe 
really felt it a conscientious duty to do so. 

She was one of the first people to whom 
I wrote within three or four days of my 
brother's death. 

This last summer I fulfilled a long 
promise by spending a week in her house, 
which I think was a great pleasure and 
satisfaction to us both. It was not until 
the very morning of my departure that 
she told me, to my infinite astonishment, 
that she had seen my brother, about a fort- 
night after he passed away. I think 
nothing but a strong sense of duty would 
have induced her to tell me about it even 
then ; for I know she disapproves of any- 
thing to do with spiritualistic research. 

She said : " It happened about ten days 
after I had received your letter with the 
sad news. It was in the morning, about 
eight o'clock ; I was fully awake and had 
been so for some time but had not yet 
left my bed. Suddenly, just opposite the 
bed and rather high up in the room, al- 



228 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

most as if he were in a boat (though I did 
not see any boat), I saw your brother 
quite distinctly but looking so wonder- 
fully young, younger than I had ever 
seen him in life." I reminded her that 
he had been very young (barely eighteen) 
when she had first known him and that 
perhaps he looked as he did then. " No," 
she persisted quietly, " younger than that 
— more like a young boy of sixteen; but it 
was undeniably your brother. It was im- 
possible to mistake him for a moment. He 
had on a sort of striped gray shirt and his 
face was turned toward me." 

11 Did he look unhappy ? " I said. 

" Oh, dear no — not at all; but he had 
such a curious smile on his face as he looked 
at me — a sort of triumphant look and a little 
bit satirical ; as if he were saying, ' You see 
I was right after all! ' " 

Now I am quite sure that an ordinary 
woman of strong theological bias would 
not have repeated those last sentences. 
Only a very sweet, as well as a very 
truthful, woman would have told me the 
story so accurately. 

I felt all along that she only spoke at 






HOW THE DEAD DEPART 229 

all from a strong sense of duty and would 
not abate the least particle from the exact 
facts, even although they seemed to tell 
against her own religious convictions. 

It was the more curious because the 
time exactly tallied with the date when 
he impressed me with regard to business 
details and when my letter to that effect 
crossed one from Mrs. Finch, saying that 
she had just heard from her guide, that 
my brother had come to consciousness in 
his new surroundings. It is these " cross- 
references " which are so valuable in this 
research. 

I will end this chapter by an account 
of another abnormal visitation connected 
with the departure of the dead, a story 
which I heard from the principal actor in 
it, a few days before his sudden and quite 
unexpected departure. 

I was paying a short visit to Oxford 
after a long absence, when my friends 
who lived in a certain terrace there, told 
me of some strange happenings in a house 
on the same terrace. This house was 
rented by a very well-known clergyman 
of markedly artistic and literary instincts 



230 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

and also of a very highly developed spir- 
itual nature. I had seen this gentleman 
several times after my return from a first 
visit to America and we had discussed many 
of the interesting people I had met there 
whom he also had known when holding 
a prominent official position on the Conti- 
nent. He was a very scholarly Christian 
and a strong Universalist and had known 
and been on intimate terms with many of 
the most noted men on both sides of the 
Atlantic. 

I was now told of a most curious event 
in the household. My visit to Oxford 
was paid in February and I heard that a 
favorite maid in the Baillie household 
had had three visions of angels since the 
preceding November and that nobody 
could account for the strange fact, as the 
girl was quite truthful and normal and 
not given to romancing. My friend 
added, " I told Mr. and Mrs. Baillie you 
were coming to me and they want me to 
take you in there to tea to-morrow (Sun- 
day) so you can hear all about it." 

We went next day and found a very 
sceptical old Indian gentleman staying 



HOW THE DEAD DEPAET 231 

with the Baillies, so I could not speak 
to Mr. Baillie at the moment ; but asked 
his wife quietly if she objected to telling 
me the details of the case. " Not at all," 
she said readily, " but would you not 
like to see Mary herself and hear her ac- 
count?" The pretty young housemaid 
was summoned and I was invited to ques- 
tion her. She felt naturally a little em- 
barrassed before strangers, and Mr. Baillie 
noticing this, very sensibly came to the 
rescue. Having read for the Bar before 
taking orders, he was the better able to 
put questions which would elicit informa- 
tion without suggesting it. 

" Come, Mary, tell these ladies and 
gentlemen just what you have told your 
mistress and me. What you were doing 
the night you first saw l the angels ' ? 
What time was it?" 

" If you please, sir, it was just after 
eleven o'clock at night. I had been 
brushing mistress's hair and was going 
down the flight of stairs outside her room 
when I looked up and saw three figures, 
all in white, just outside your door, sir, 
and I was so frightened, I fell down at 



232 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

the top of the stairs and mistress came 
out and found me and gave me some sal 
volatile." 

" You say you saw three figures in 
white. How could you see them ? Had 
you a candle in your hand ? " 

" No, sir." 

" Then how could you see them ? There 
would be no light in the passage at that 
hour and the lamp-post is too much to 
the right of us to throw any reflection 
upon the rooms or passages in this house." 

The girl looked puzzled ; then she said 
quietly, u I don't know, sir, how it was I 
saw them. But I did see them quite dis- 
tinctly ; they seemed to bring their own 
light and I saw some beautiful flashing 
stones like diamonds on one of them." 
(This curiously bears out what I saw 
in America once. It was explained 
to me as a mark of rank in the spirit- 
world, much to the mystification and 
contempt of one of my reviewers. — 
E. K. B.) 

The cross-examination meanwhile con- 
tinued. " Well, Mary, tell us what you 
were talking about with your mistress 



HOW THE DEAD DEPART 233 

before you saw this vision. Had she 
been reading the Bible to you or speak- 
ing about spirits or angels ? " 

" No, sir," answered the truthful Mary. 
" Mistress had been talking about your 
shirts, sir — she said they were not suffi- 
ciently starched and that I must speak 
to the laundress next morning." 

This very mundane and matter-of-fact 
answer made us all smile a little. 

" Well, Mary, when did you see them 
again ? " 

" About a month later, sir. They were 
standing by your door again, but I was 
not so much frightened that time," she 
added conscientiously. 

" Well, and the third time ? " Mr. Baillie 
continued. 

" That was a few days ago, sir." 

"And were they in the same part of 
the passage as before ? " 

"Yes, sir — just the same place — close 
to the door of your room." 

" Well, you can go now, Mary," he 
said kindly, and the girl turned round 
to leave the room. 

As she passed my chair, I said to her 



234 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

casually, " Do you think you will ever 
see them again ? " 

" Oh, I hope so, ma'am ! " she answered. 
" They looked beautiful the last time, and 
I was not a bit frightened/' she added 
brightly. 

As we left the house I said to my 
friend, " Did you notice that Mary said 
the angels were always close to Mr. 
Baillie's room?" 

" Yes, I did," she answered; " but I 
don't think Mrs. Baillie noticed it. I am 
very glad of that. It might have made 
her nervous." 

Two days later I returned to London 
and in the middle of the week had a 
note from my Oxford friend in which 
she said — 

" I met Mr. Baillie in the street just 
now. He is very anxious to have an in- 
terview with you alone next time you 
come here. He says he fully believes 
in all the American experiences you 
have told him since you returned from 
America, but he thinks they were all 
fiends. He is going to stay with his 
brother at Cheltenham on Saturday next 



HOW THE DEAD DEPART 235 

for a week or two ; but hopes to see you 
later if you are down here." 

This letter reached me on Wednesday or 
Thursday. On the Saturday Mr. Baillie 
traveled to Cheltenham as arranged, to 
pay the visit to his brother, was taken 
suddenly ill and became unconscious. 
His wife was telegraphed for immedi- 
ately and arrived on Sunday morning 
but he did not recover consciousness and 
passed away in the evening, exactly 
within one week of the day when he was 
cross-examining his maid-servant about 
her three visions ! 

Doubtless the " angels " were in the 
house during those three months pre- 
ceding his decease, preparing him, per- 
haps unconsciously, for his journey to the 
unseen shores. 

Probably he lived so much already in 
those spheres that it was easy for them 
to draw nearer than ever to him at this 
crisis in his life. Yet it was not his 
spiritual vision, but the etheric eyes of 
the little maid that really "saw" the 
spirit messengers so close to his room. 

A year or two after Mr. Baillie's tran- 



236 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

sition, his wife told me of a beautiful 
dream she had had the previous night in 
which she had seen and spoken to her 
husband. 

" I was sitting in a lovely garden in 
my dream," she said, " and as I admired 
the exquisite flowers and wondered where 
I could be, dearest Arthur (her husband) 
came toward me and took my hand, say- 
ing, ' Come, dear, and let us take a walk 
together in this beautiful place/ and I got 
up and went with him and then I woke. 
The next morning Mary came in to brush 
and arrange my hair, and before I had 
said a word about the dream to her, she 
said to me, ' I had such a curious dream 
last night about you and the master. I 
thought you were sitting in a beautiful 
garden full of all kinds of curious flowers 
that I had never seen before, and master 
came up to you suddenly and took your 
hand and said, " Come, dear, let us take 
a walk together in this beautiful place." 
She had dreamed the same dream as my- 
self in every detail and she told it to me 
before I had spoken of mine." 

This shows that some strong bond of 



HOW THE DEAD DEPART 237 

affinity must have existed between mis- 
tress and maid, and that fact may have 
had something to do with Mary's previous 
experiences. 



CHAPTER XII 

GUARDIAN CHILDREN 

Whilst preparing this small volume 
for the press, I have quite suddenly re- 
membered such a remarkable case of re- 
turn of the so-called dead, so excellent as 
regards tests, and coming so entirely and 
forcibly within my own experience, that 
I cannot understand how the incidents 
(of quite recent occurrence) can have re- 
mained latent in my memory until the 
last chapter in my book has been 
reached. 

There may be some good reason for 
the curious obliteration of this most ex- 
cellent testimony until I had written 
other and perhaps equally valuable, 
though less fascinating chapters. 

In any case I think the good wine has 
been kept for the last, for which we have, 
at any rate, Biblical precedent. 

As the lady whose experiences are in- 
volved in this story has been for two or 
238 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 239 

three years in South Africa, I wrote to 
Mr. Stead as soon as the door of this 
special chamber in my memory had been 
unlocked, to ask him if he considered 
that I was at liberty to mention the case. 
I know how passionately eager this lady 
has always been to share her own privi- 
leges with other less fortunate mothers ; 
but I also know that there has been some 
talk for several years past of publishing 
a record of her constant communion with 
her young son, and of course I would 
not, upon any consideration, anticipate 
such a book in any way that could be 
detrimental to it. 

As the manuscripts and the whole ques- 
tion of publication will pass through the 
hands of Mr. W. T. Stead, I felt that I 
was going to the fountain-head in asking 
his permission to devote my last chapter 
to giving some account of this guardian 
child. 

As I do not know whether the mother 
will decide to publish under her own 
name, I think it advisable to call her 
Mrs. Hope. Mr. Stead telegraphed his 
approval of my suggestion and has fol- 



240 DO THE BEAD DEPART? 

lowed this up by a letter just received, 
from which I quote the following sen- 
tences : — 

" As for the question in your letter — I 
cannot for a moment think there can be 
any doubt in the matter. Mrs. Hope is 
only too anxious to have the proof which 
she has found out by experience made ac- 
cessible to the largest number of people. 
I have not yet received her manuscript 
but I believe it is on its way. Nothing 
you can say will in the least degree in- 
jure the sale of her book." 

I trust that this chapter may on the 
contrary be an avant coureur to her inter- 
esting records. 

She kindly placed several folios of type- 
written manuscript in my hands before 
she sailed for South Africa, and I can 
truthfully say that I felt after reading 
them that Gordon Hope's character was 
as sharply defined in my mind as that of 
any other boy-friend of my acquaintance. 
Far more so, I think ; because the child's 
impulsive, lovable and highly sensitive 
character was revealed in this systematic 
and intimate intercourse between mother 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 241 

and child in a far more impressive way 
than any outsider could, as a general 
rule, come to know during any boy's 
earth life. 

And now for the facts of the case. 

Some years ago I was in the habit of 
hearing Mr. Stead refer to some remark- 
able experiences that a young mother 
had had through automatic writing with 
her son, a boy recently deceased. I 
don't think he entered into any special 
detail but he mentioned the name, which 
was quite unknown to me, and I took no 
very vital interest in the matter. 

I did once happen, however, to speak 
of Mrs. Hope in the hearing of my 
friend Colonel Edward Seymour, and he 
said : " I think that Mrs. Hope was a 
Miss Edith Molyneux, the very pretty 
girl with whom the Duke of Clarence 
insisted upon dancing the whole night 
when the Bacchante put in at Ceylon, 
much to the disgust of the old dowagers 
to whom he ought by rights to have been 
paying attention." 

I remembered hearing of this incident 
years ago, but my special interest lay in 



242 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

the fact that the name of Molyneux at 
once recalled a very old friend of my 
own, who had recently died in Egypt. 

Sir Augustus Molyneux had been sent to 
Egypt years ago as a celebrated financier, 
and for many years had been employed 
by the English Government in that 
capacity. I had spent weeks under his 
hospitable roof in Cairo and wondered 
whether this lady might be a niece of 
his. 

A few weeks later we were introduced 
to each other and I found that my sur- 
mise was correct. She spoke with the 
greatest affection of " dear old Uncle 
Augustus," and had spent much of her 
early life with him and his wife in Egypt 
and London. 

This at once formed a bond between 
us. I invited her to come and see me 
and this was the beginning of our 
lengthy and interesting acquaintance. 
She had very soon told me the facts 
which I am now about to relate. I think 
she and I first met each other in 1902, and 
her boy, Gordon Hope, had passed away 
two years previously, dying at Tunbridge 



GUAKDIAN CHILDKEN 243 

School, at the early age of twelve. Mrs. 
Hope has two elder sons and is a most 
devoted little mother, hut Gordon was her 
" Benjamin," and she spoke pathetically 
of her overwhelming and rebellious grief 
when he was taken from her. 

At the time of his death she had no 
deep religious convictions nor spiritual 
experience to console her, and the 
whole world seemed a blank when her 
dear little youngest son died so sud- 
denly. 

After Gordon's death in February, 1900, 
his mother had taken a small flat and 
was living there with her two other sons 
when I knew her. 

She had at first a young servant, 
Nellie, who did not live in the flat but 
came there every day to do the work. 

One summer morning, about six 
months after her terrible loss, she was 
lying in bed thinking over her great sor- 
row and had been crying very much, 
when Nellie arrived at the flat and good- 
naturedly proposed making a cup of 
early tea for her mistress, who seemed so 
much upset. 



244 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

Nellie had not only never seen Gordon 
but had never heard of his existence. 

" Is your head bad, ma'am ? " she said 
sympathetically, when she brought the 
tea to the bedside. 

" No, Nellie, it is not my head. I 
have been crying so much because I have 
been thinking of my dear little son who 
left me six months ago." 

14 Dear me, ma'am ! I never knew 
there were more than the two young 
gentlemen." 

44 Oh, yes, Nellie. I had a dear, dear 
boy of twelve. He died at Tunbridge 
School last February." 

Now Nellie had been in the Salvation 
Army, and, true to her training, began 
at once, with the best intentions, to quote 
the usual texts about God's love in tak- 
ing our beloved from us, and how the 
Lord gave and therefore could take away, 
and how we must submit and believe 
that it was all done in love, etc., etc. 

Mrs. Hope, who is an essentially 
natural woman, could not stand this 
44 empty chaff well meant for grain," and 
in spite of her gratitude for poor Nellie's 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 245 

sympathy, begged that she would not go 
on repeating texts which brought her no 
consolation and sounded only like empty 
words in her ears. So Nellie wisely re- 
frained from any more speeches and 
showed a more practical sympathy by 
proposing to come and live in the flat 
and thus look after her young mistress 
more effectually. Nellie had a good 
home and was not actually forced to take 
permanent service anywhere, but said she 
thought she should like to live with 
Mrs. Hope and " do for her and try to 
cheer her up a bit." So the bargain was 
struck and Nellie became a permanent 
member of the household. 

Months passed and Christmas came. 
Mrs. Hope gave her younger son, Frank, 
a silver pencil as a Christmas present, 
which she had bought from Messrs. 
Derry & Tom's bazaar in High Street, 
Kensington. Frank, after the manner 
of boys, did not care much for the pencil 
and hinted that he should have preferred 
choosing for himself, as he wanted some 
new sort of game to play in the even- 
ings. So Mrs. Hope said : " Well, Frank, 



246 DO THE DEAD DEPAET? 

I cannot afford to give you two Christmas 
presents, but if you like, we will go to 
Derry & Tom's together and ask if you 
may change the pencil and choose some- 
thing else for yourself." Derry & Tom's 
at once gave permission and suggested 
that the " young gentleman " and his 
mother should " step down-stairs " into 
the Christmas bazaar and look about for 
themselves. No sooner said than done ! 

Now, Mrs. Hope knew so little about 
psychic matters in those days — never hav- 
ing heard about such things, as she told 
me — that when Frank looked up and saw 
a card box on a top shelf with Planchette 
written on it and appealed to his mother 
to know what it was, she answered at 
once : 

" I don't quite know what it is, Frank, 
but I believe it is some sort of drawing- 
room game. Do you think you would 
like it?" Frank thought he would like 
it and rather hurriedly at the last, the ex- 
change was made, and it was only on 
reaching home that mother and son found 
to their great disgust that it was no parlor 
game at all, but a stupid, spiritualistic 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 247 

fraud ! However they could not go back 
again to the bazaar, so there was nothing 
for it but to read the instructions and see 
if any kind of amusement could be ex- 
tracted from the silly little instrument, on 
its three little wooden legs. 

In this mood of annoyance and careless 
investigation, Mrs. Hope approached the 
crowning experience of her life ! 

What trivial incidents lead up generally 
to these great moments ! But there was 
to be some delay still in this particular case. 

As soon as Mrs. Hope and her boy had 
put their fingers on the despised Plan- 
chette, a pet name, used only between 
Gordon and his mother, was given at 
once, and this shocked and distressed her 
so much that she insisted upon packing 
the uncanny " toy " away on the top shelf 
of a cupboard and did not look at it again 
for a month. 

During this month, however, she was 
constantly tormented by the thought that 
somehow Gordon knew what she had 
done and was sorry about it. Little by 
little, this impression became stronger. 

At last she could resist the pressure of 



248 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

it no longer and one day she went to the 
cupboard and took down the card box 
from the upper shelf. I think Nellie 
must have been present at this moment. 
Anyway she and her mistress sat down to 
test the thing once more, and it was then 
and there proved that Nellie was a very 
strong medium ; and very quickly, quite 
long and coherent messages came through 
the battery formed by Mrs. Hope and her- 
self. This was the more satisfactory be- 
cause Nellie, having never heard of Gor- 
don previously, could not be accused of 
trickery and certainly knew nothing of 
his peculiarities of speech nor of the many 
little sayings and doings of the past, to 
which he constantly referred. 

Telepathy from Mrs. Hope will be 
naturally at once suggested and might 
cover some of the facts but certainly not 
all of them, as we shall see later. 

I have read all these early records, 
typed out exactly as they were received and 
without the smallest attempt at editing. 
The loving, impulsive, eager and often 
over-sensitive child is photographed in 
these records for any one who reads them 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 249 

with sympathy and intelligence. The 
repetition of words, the almost pathetic 
eagerness to impress his real meaning, 
his deprecating assurance again and again 
that he was telling the " real, real truth," 
however strange it might appear ; in fact 
the absolute actuality of the child's pres- 
ence and personality, all this makes these 
pages not only very thrilling but very 
pathetic reading. 

I do not envy any one who can read 
them through without feeling at the end 
that he has been in touch with a very 
loving and beautiful little nature and 
has been allowed access into that Holy 
of Holies — a child's intimate communion 
with its mother. 

I cannot recall, in thinking over these 
records, that Mrs. Hope's own personality 
(so well known to me by then) ever in- 
truded in the least degree upon her boy's 
utterances. Of course her own questions 
or answers and remarks were duly noted 
in the typed script ; but I am referring 
to Gordon's own words. The channel 
seemed to me extraordinarily clear and 
quite unusually free from the coloring 



250 BO THE DEAD DEPART? 

matter which so often stains similar 
communications, with the thoughts and 
prejudices of the receiver. Perhaps Mrs. 
Hope's genius for motherhood and ab- 
sorbing love for her child may have had 
something to say to these pure and un- 
embellished records. 

Gordon always spoke of being in the 
" Happy Land" as he called it, and never 
confounded this with heaven. In fact it 
was clearly differentiated in his mind ; 
for he spoke constantly of an Aunt Etta 
(a young sister of his mother's who had 
died years before in India) as being with 
him at first, and later told us that " Aunt 
Etta was soon going to heaven." 

When his mother suggested that he 
would be sorry for this, as he would miss 
her so much, he said at once : " Oh, 
no, mummy ! Nobody is ever sorry here 
when any one goes to heaven because, of 
course, it is so happy for them." There 
was never the slightest suspicion of 
" cant " about any of Gordon's speeches. 
They were absolutely natural and just 
what a sweet-natured boy of twelve years 
old, living in beautiful and harmonious 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 251 

conditions, might have uttered. It only 
seemed strange to him that anybody could 
be supposed to regret that which would 
make a much-loved aunt still more happy. 
I think if a favorite schoolfellow had been 
put into a higher Form at Tunbridge 
School, he would have spoken of it in 
much the same way. 

He talked often about his lessons, 
which seemed to be going on with a 
teacher whom he called " Love " — prob- 
ably some symbolical name suggested to 
him in the Happy Land. Several times 
when his mother, after the natural man- 
ner of people who suppose that the next 
sphere means unlimited knowledge, had 
asked him some question beyond his 
depth, he would say that he would ask 
his teacher, but could not answer the 
question himself. " You must remember, 
mummy, darling, that I am not a philos- 
opher — only a little boy still." 

It interested me very much, at the 
time of reading these records, to compare 
his description of his surroundings with 
that given by an entirely different person- 
ality, i. e., the son of Judge Forbes, whom 



252 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

I have mentioned in my previous book 
as Talbot Forbes. The latter was twenty 
years old when he passed over, and hav- 
ing been killed so suddenly, he seemed 
for some little time to cling to the scenes 
of his earth life, or, more probably, to be 
unable physically to leave them entirely. 
He spoke of being " in the trenches with the 
men of my company/ 7 and of trying to 
help and encourage them. But this 
phase soon passed away and then Talbot 
also spoke to his mother of a continued 
education going on. He seemed to be 
specially " studying natural history with 
my tutor, Wordsworth" All Etonians will 
recognize the essentially Etonian form of 
the last words ; but we never quite made 
out which member of the Wordsworth 
family was referred to. At first Talbot 
could see earthly scenes with his mother, as 
it were. I mean that if she were riding 
or walking in beautiful scenery, he seemed 
able to be with her invisibly and able to 
enjoy it together, as they had so often 
done upon earth. But later he told her he 
was losing touch with earth in these ways 
and could only see earth scenes as they were 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 253 

pictured in his mother's brain. This seems 
to me a very interesting and suggestive 
point. Talbot would say, " You must 
think the picture you want me to see and 
then I can see it in your thoughts, but I 
cannot see the earth scenery directly any 
longer; " or words to that effect. 

Now the interesting point to me, when 
I had the opportunity of comparing these 
records simultaneously, was the fact that 
both Gordon Hope and Talbot Forbes 
were evidently describing the same con- 
ditions and the same locality (if we may 
use the word), but the one from the 
standpoint of a child of twelve and the 
other from the standpoint of a young 
man of twenty. The two had never met 
upon earth nor even heard of each other, 
although, as a matter of fact, they passed 
over within five or six weeks of one 
another ; one at Lady smith, 6th January 
1900, and little Gordon at Tunbridge in 
February of the same year. Mrs. Forbes 
and Mrs. Hope only met once, for an 
hour at a restaurant, through my ar- 
rangement. They were, and still remain, 
strangers to each other, and the writing 



254 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

was entirely independent in every pos- 
sible way. Yet the child and the young 
man were undoubtedly describing similar 
experiences from different standpoints. 

To turn now to the more evidential 
side of some of Gordon's remarks. After 
the communicating channel had been 
opened as described, he spoke often to 
his mother of a Mr. Frost who had been 
very kind to him in his new surround- 
ings. The name cropped up constantly 
but with no indication of the identity. 
Mrs. Hope was naturally interested in 
anybody who had been kind to her boy. 
Moreover she hoped to get some sort of 
test by asking for further particulars, so 
she begged Gordon to find out something 
about Mr. Frost, his Christian name, 
former place of residence, in fact any- 
thing that could be tested from this side. 
She did not tell Gordon her reason for 
this but merely said, quite truly, that 
she would like to know more about any 
one who had been good to her little son. 
In a few days the desired information was 
given and far more abundantly than could 
have been hoped for or expected. I will 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 255 

reproduce it as nearly in the original 
words as possible but wish it to be clearly 
understood that in this case I am trust- 
ing to the " unusually retentive memory" 
with which Mr. Stead is good enough to 
credit me. Fortunately Mrs. Hope's own 
records will soon be available and then 
small details can be corrected. I am sure 
that in all essentials my story is exact 
and I shall also in this case give the real 
name of the Mr. Frost in question. 

Gordon, communicating, said : "I asked 
Mr. Frost what you wanted to know, 
mummy. He was going out riding and 
I ran after him and caught hold of his 
stirrup and told him you wanted to know 
who he was. He looked so amused and 
he said, ' Well, little shrimp ! you can tell 
your mother that my name was John 
Noble Oakshott Frost. I lived near 
Portsmouth (he mentioned the town, 
street and number, which for obvious 
reasons I withhold). I passed over here 
nine years ago. I had influenza, and 
pneumonia afterward and that killed 
me. I was engaged to be married at the 
time to Blanche — no, I won't give her 



256 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

other name, because she has forgotten 
me ; but you can tell your mother all I 
have told you.' " 

Mrs. Hope did not happen to know the 
town indicated but she wrote to the post- 
master and verified the street mentioned 
and then thought it worth while to go 
further in the matter. After other in- 
quiries had been made through friends 
on the spot, all the facts were verified, 
even to the surname of the fiancee, which 
had been withheld by her deceased lover I 

This naturally gave Mrs. Hope faith in 
her power to take the messages from her 
little son truthfully, and without ming- 
ling them with her own thoughts and 
preconceptions. She has had numberless 
other tests. I mentioned the above be- 
cause it involved several distinct state- 
ments of definite facts, entirely outside 
of the knowledge of either Mrs. Hope or 
of Nellie. 

Having met Mrs. Hope's elder surviv- 
ing son, a handsome young fellow of 
nineteen or twenty at the time of which 
I am speaking, I asked her one day what 
he thought of the writings and whether 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 257 

he accepted them as coming from his 
brother. 

" Percy cannot very well doubt them," 
she said, smiling, " after some of the ex- 
periences he has had. I will tell you 
one of them that happened quite lately." 

Percy Hope had gone on the stage and 
had been fortunate enough to obtain a 
good position in the company of Mr. and 
Mrs. Kendal, then on tour. He had 
been very anxious to have a reliable 
watch and his mother had been saving 
money to send him the best she could 
afford, which was a silver one with good 
works. She had sent this to the town — 
Scarborough, I think — where the com- 
pany was due to be playing at that 
special time ; but she heard nothing from 
Percy of its arrival and as the weeks 
passed on, she became anxious both 
about the watch and also about Percy 
himself. 

In her trouble she confided in Gordon 
and begged him to try and find out some- 
thing about the watch if it were possible, 
also as to Percy's health and well-being, 
as his silence troubled her so much. A 



258 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

few days later Gordon announced (in 
answer to an urgent appeal) that he had 
found out, but that he would rather not 
tell her. This naturally increased her 
fears and she pressed him to tell her at 
once, as the suspense was worse than any 
news could be. 

" But, mummy, I don't want to tell 
you. It's nothing very bad. Percy isn't 
ill, but he will call me a little sneak if I 
tell you." Mrs. Hope still begged him 
to relieve her fears and promised not to 
write to Percy about anything Gordon 
might say, but to wait until she saw him. 
She then added, " So do tell me, darling. 
Did Percy ever receive the watch I sent 
him ? " 

" Yes, he got it all right, but he has 
taken it to the pop-shop (!) That is why 
he does not like to write to you about it. 
He got 2s. 6d. for it (I cannot be sure of 
exact sums) and Is. 9d. for a pencil he 

took with it. It was a shop in 

Street." Gordon also gave the number 
and the name of the shop in Scar- 
borough. 

Mrs. Hope waited patiently for Percy's 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 259 

return to London, and then confronted 
him with Gordon's script. 

" Good God ! " he said in his astonish- 
ment. " How on earth did he know all 
that? It is all perfectly true, mother." 

So Percy Hope's scepticism received a 
final blow and he became greatly in- 
terested in his mother's experiences. 

To my great regret, Mrs. Hope made 
up her mind to go to South Africa two or 
three years ago, still guided by the 
mother instinct, though not in this case 
as regards Gordon. Her second boy had 
the chance of a position out there, 
thanks to some of her own relations, and 
she did not like him to go out to a 
strange colony alone, at the age of six- 
teen. Percy was able to manage for 
himself by this time ; so she and Nellie 
shipped themselves off to Johannesburg, 
and she has only paid one short visit to 
this country since, when unfortunately 
we were unable to arrange a meeting. 

Nellie meanwhile has married in the 
colony. At first this was a terrible trial 
to her mistress. Not only did she lose a 
faithful maid but also the only means 



260 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

she then had of communicating with her 
boy. It seemed like losing him over 
again ; but brighter days were in store 
for her, I am thankful to sa}^. 

The curious point was that although 
Nellie seemed necessary to make the bat- 
tery, Nellie alone could not receive Gor- 
don's messages. For a time — after part- 
ing with Nellie — the world once more 
seemed a terrible wilderness to the poor 
mother. But love as usual has " found 
out the way." By dint of perseverance 
and prayer (for the little son had been 
the means of opening her spiritual per- 
ceptions) Mrs. Hope has developed at 
length the capacity for receiving mes- 
sages from her child without any outside 
assistance. 

This is the last I heard of her. Pos- 
sibly by this time, the more material 
method may have been superseded alto- 
gether, in favor of some clairaudient 
process. 

We must wait for more definite infor- 
mation on all these points, until the 
promised manuscript is published. I 
have said enough, I hope, to rouse the 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 261 

attention of my readers and put them on 
the qui vive for the appearance of this 
unique record. 

Will Gordon still return as the little 
boy of twelve ? I think not. I believe 
we shall have a later development of his 
personality, still evolving in one of the 
Father's " many mansions " ; but I feel 
sure that he will have kept his sweet and 
joyous nature and that touch of magnetic 
attraction which I myself felt so keenly. 
And I have no doubt at all that all who 
read about him will love him as much 
as I did when these earlier records were 
placed in my hands. 

One small but important point has 
been omitted in my story. On several 
occasions Gordon referred to matters, 
often trifling in themselves, which he 
declared that he had already mentioned 
to his mother. 

11 But, darling, you did not really tell 
me this or that," she would say. 

" But I did, mummy, darling. I truly 
did. Oh, you don't think I would tell 
you a story about it ? " 

Sometimes in reading these things it 



262 DO THE DEAD DEPART? 

was hard to restrain one's tears. The 
loving, sensitive little heart was so plainly 
visible, obliged to tell the exact truth but 
hating to contradict his mother and ter- 
ribly afraid she might think him obsti- 
nate or untruthful. It was sometimes too 
pathetic for words. At length, to my in- 
finite relief, the mystery was solved to 
the satisfaction of all of us. 

Poor little Gordon had evidently asked 
his teacher or some other kind spirit to 
explain matters and the explanation was 
so simple and so interesting. 

" You see, mummy, darling, you always 
come to see me when you go to sleep. I 
mean when your body goes to sleep. And 
then of course I tell you things. And 
then I tell you things when we walk 
together like this. And I get it all mixed 
up, and you cannot remember the things I 
tell you when you come here and some- 
times I think I have told them to you 
in our talks together down here. Do 
you understand me now, darling?" 

So the loving little heart was set quite 
at rest and that trouble was laid for- 
ever. 



GUARDIAN CHILDREN 263 

And so we must leave them — the child 
guardian and the happy mother — alone 
together. 

In the face of such testimony surely we 
can all reecho — if only for a moment — 
the triumphant cry — - 

" Oh, Q4atfi, where is thy victory ? Oh, 
Death, where is thy sting ? " 



FINIS 



Crystal Gazing 

By Northcote W. Thomas 

This volume covers the history and practice of 
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book. 

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evidence and make it available for the ordinary citizen 
who cannot find time to read the whole of the thirty 
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by Professor Thomas is of intense interest, dealing 
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SEEN AND UNSEEN 

i?jy ^ Katharine Bates 

Treating of the Volume as the Book of the Month In the 
" Review of Reviews " Mr. W. T. STEAD wrote : 

" « Seen and Unseen ' is a wonderful book. If any one de- 
sires to read something that will at once amaze him and thrill 
him, arouse an angry spirit of contemptuous disbelief, and then 
compel him to admit that after all these things which he hates 
and despises may be true, this is the book to buy. To buy, I 
say, not to borrow : for it is a book which you will want to 
lend, and which after you have lent will not come back to you, 
for it will again be lent or stolen, and you will have to buy an- 
other copy. For * Seen and Unseen ' is a book which more 
than any other that I have come across is calculated to awaken 
in the mind of the average reader what will be for him a most 
weird and unwelcome suspicion that he is living in a world 
within a world of which he knows nothing, and that he has 
hitherto had hardly even a glimmering conception of the magic 
and the mystery of life. 

" This book, ' Seen and Unseen ' by its simplicity, its lucidity, 
its obvious truthfulness and the capacity and standing of its 
author, will probably effect a permanent breach in the thick 
and high wall with which many persons have shut themselves 
in from the unseen world, fearing lest they should see or hear 
or scent anything inconsistent with their snailshell philosophy." 

" We feel convinced of the good faith of Miss Bates." — 
Evening Standard. 

" Miss Bates is a ' psychic ' of no mean degree of power." — 
Church Times. 

" The most extraordinary book we have ever read." — Method- 
ist Recorder. 

" A truly remarkable volume." — Publisher and Bookseller. 

" Certainly the believer, the sceptic, and the mocker should 
all read her book."— Pall Mall Gazette. 

" The book is one of the most interesting we have read, and 
it is written with evident sincerity and balance." — Morning 
Leader. 

" Both spiritualist and sceptic will find this book remarkably 
interesting and entertaining." — Tribune. 

12 mo, Cloth, $1.50 Net. 

New York - Dodge Publishing Co. 



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